Matti Pihlajamaa

VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland | vtt · Foresight-driven Business Strategies

Driven by digitalization, the emergence of startups, and regulatory changes, the banking industry is undergoing a “fintech revolution” where the competitive advantages of incumbents are disrupted. In response, banks collaborate with startups by organizing accelerators and incubators to promote corporate innovation. A critical challenge is achieving...

Public procurement has gained a heightened role in responding to grand societal challenges. Additional goals besides the more traditional objectives for public procurement have produced conflicts and raised the question of how to assess public procurement comprehensively. In this article, we explore the impact model created for the National Public...

Public organizations’ ability to promote sustainability is becoming a critical issue in public management research and practice. However, there is a scarce understanding of how to enable sustainability transformation in cities. Our study contributes to the literature on sustainability in city management by introducing the concept of transformative...

As local authorities and providers of services and infrastructures, cities can advance sustainability transformations through instruments like public procurement. However, a disconnect exists between broad (supra)national sustainability challenges and public procurers' local needs. We examine innovation contests as a tool for articulating societal...

Public procurement emerges as an instrument to promote sustainability and innovation, facilitating the implementation of policy goals. Adaptive procurement leverages sustainable innovation available in the market. Developmental procurement creates demand for solutions that do not exist yet but need to be developed first. Real-world applications fro...

Yrityksen toimintokohtaisen jalostusarvon ymmärrys ja raportointi korostuu, kun pyrimme parempaan ymmärrykseen tutkimus-kehitys-ja innovaatiopolitiikan (tki) toimenpiteiden kohdistamisesta sekä kestävästä kehityksestä, mutta miten ymmärrys jalostusarvosta muuttaa näkymäämme suomalaisiin yrityksiin ja miten laskentaa voisi kehittää vielä pidemmälle,...

In eco-welfare states, welfare provision must operate within planetary boundaries, entailing societal transformations and significant emission reductions. This article contributes to the research on sustainable welfare and eco-social policies by examining transformative and integrative eco-social initiatives that aim to reduce environmental impacts...

The benefits of inbound open innovation are widely acknowledged, but not all companies are successful in their attempts to leverage external sources of innovation. Those with dynamic capabilities perform better, but developing and maintaining such capabilities generates costs. Therefore, a given company needs to find out which capabilities are wort...

Impact bonds have emerged as a policy innovation with the potential to change public policies towards being more outcome-based and pre-emptive – and more effective in answering sustainability challenges. This financial instrument has been used for social problems and only recently for environmental issues. One example is the Nutrient-EIB (environme...

Raportissa esitetään KIRI-hankkeen tulokset koskien kestävien ja innovatiivisten julkisten hankintojen riskien jakamista. Uusien ratkaisujen käyttöönottoon liittyy useita epävarmuuksia, jotka tekevät innovatiivisten hankintojen riskit tavanomaisia hankintoja korkeammiksi. Raportissa tarkastellaan riskien luonnetta eri tyyppisissä hankinnoissa liitt...

The data set contains data collected using a paper format and an online survey. The data includes a sample of 120 Finnish companies. The survey, structured into six sections focuses on the firms’ growth outlooks and the underlying management practices and principles. The data reports the perceptions of top managers on growth, innovativeness, and th...

Purpose The article explores what forms of disruption are prioritized by top executives of large manufacturing companies in Finland and what strategies they consider appropriate for the management of disruptive threats and opportunities. Design/methodology/approach The empirical study was based on interviews with top executives in some of Finland'...

Tulosperusteiset rahoitussopimukset ovat rantautuneet Suomeen uutena politiikkainstrumenttina, jonka keskiössä on taloudellisen tuottavuuden ja yhteiskunnallisen tai ekologisen vaikuttavuuden yhtäaikainen tavoittelu. Sopimuksia on toistaiseksi hyödynnetty niin Suomessa kuin globaalistikin lähinnä sosiaalisten ongelmien ratkaisemisen parissa, mutta...

Digital transformation brings significant challenges for managing competences. Exploiting digital technologies requires new competences, which need to be combined with existing competences to increase business efficiency and introduce digital innovations. However, competence combination for digital transformation is particularly challenging due to...

The article provides a new framework to manage and develop corporate foresight, guiding strategic thinking and business growth. Systematically managed strategic foresight is one of the keys to successful corporate transformation and to business success in the 2020s. It also paves the way to identifying strategic paths and to defining roadmaps that...

Public procurement of innovation is a key policy instrument for improving the quality of public services and achieving wider benefits for society. Recently, innovation contests have re-emerged as a means to procure innovative new solutions. There is, however, limited understanding of how innovation contests should be organized in the public sector....

Business experimentation has been recognized as an important means for accelerating transitions towards a circular economy (CE). This paper aims to develop a new understanding of how learning from business experiments at the front end of innovation may help develop ideas and concepts that can advance a CE. The study adopts a case study approach and...

The capability to develop and sustain superior knowledge of markets and supply chains, or supply market intelligence (SMI), is an important element in increasing the strategic relevance of purchasing and supply management (PSM). This study draws on information processing theory (IPT) to shed light on how firms acquire SMI. In particular, the study...

In this chapter our objective is twofold. First we try to present a comprehensive vision of the evolutionary role of the purchasing function in regard of the Offer Creation Process (OCP) of firms. We present 3 alternative organizational solutions enabling to effectively connect the purchasing actors to the OCP. Thereby, among the new roles emerging...

Drawing on the literature on supplier innovation, supplier development, and the relational view, we bring forward the concept of stimulation of supplier innovation, which refers to the buyer company's actions which aim to enhance its suppliers' innovativeness, guide its suppliers' innovation processes, and/or encourage its suppliers to share their...

The capability to innovate is increasingly at the core of the success and survival of companies. The development of new products, services, and ways of doing business is needed to respond to changes in the companies' operating environments. Often it is not sufficient to improve existing products and services. Instead, companies aim to develop radic...

If companies rely strongly on internal R&D and existing networks their ability to introduce radical innovations may suffer. Opening up to new idea sources may provide a solution. Incumbent companies, however, often suffer from the tendency to reject radical ideas from unusual sources. This study investigates how social integration mechanisms (SIMs;...

Firms tap into user knowledge to learn about the users’ needs. While users have been recognized as a valuable source of knowledge for innovation, few studies have investigated how their knowledge is integrated into innovation processes in the context of complex products and systems (CoPS). The purpose of this study is to reveal the practices of CoP...

Prior literature suggests that significant internal R&D resources are needed to leverage suppliers for innovation and that external knowledge sources can be used to complement the internal knowledge base. Based on the analysis of four inbound open innovation projects at Fortum, a multinational energy utility company, we argue that companies with lo...

The purchasing and supply management (PSM) field is criticized for being poorly connected to major management theories. In this paper, we choose a key construct – absorptive capacity (AC) – used by several such theories, and compare it with supplier involvement in new product development – a significant research stream within PSM. We identify simil...

Developing radical innovations is highly demanding because of high uncertainties which give rise to unanticipated problems and discoveries. Managing individual motivation is therefore an important component of the radical innovation capability. This study presents a theoretical model of managing individual motivation in radical innovation developme...

This paper discusses how a company stimulates innovations by suppliers in infrastructure construction by using an alliance model. In this industry, the designers and contractors have traditionally worked separately, and projects have been precisely defined in advance. Construction projects that use an alliance model excel in terms of costs, profit,...

Innovation policy can never be fully technology-neutral and policies often align to support incumbent technological regimes obstructing the development of new industries. In this paper, two fields are analyzed: the life sciences industry and the solar energy industry to evaluate the Finnish innovation policy’s capabilities to promote emerging indus...

Purpose – This paper aims to identify inducement and blocking mechanisms which impact the development of the life sciences innovation system in Finland. Innovation system analysis of emerging technologies is important for the design of technology-specific innovation policy measures to promote desirable futures Design/methodology/approach – This ex...

The life science sector is among the fastest growing knowledge fields characterized by a high rate of radical innovations. However, it does not have a long history as a distinct industrial sector. It is strongly regulated, and its products usually have long development cycles. Further challenges arise from the inherent uncertainty linked to biologi...