This paper explores practices associated with involving customers in the pricing process of new digital offerings in a business-to-business context (B2B), including the degree and timing of engagement, as well as the related challenges. The scientific contribution is related to testing and innovative pricing of digital offerings used in production, manufacturing, and construction contexts, and four pricing tests in four different organizations are presented and analyzed. Data were collected in a multifaceted approach using a diverse set of information sources, including semi structured interviews, workshops, internal documents, and email conversations. Results show that traditional pricing practices and product logic mind-sets are hard to break andit's difficult to create a mind-set focused on values. The results indicate that a key to increasing and achieving a deeper degree of customer involvement in B2B-context is to engage the sales organizations.

Solving many current societal challenges requires collaboration between numerous actors from different disciplines. However, there are several challenges in these interdisciplinary collaborations that have managerial implications, which this article aims to describe. The study is based on observations and fourteen interviews with actors from three innovation ecosystems (IES) that attack the challenges with the help of digitalization and enabling technology. Examples of identified challenges are difficulties for participating competitors to cooperate, that actors may feel threatened by the approaching result from the collaboration, that the actors may have different underlying motives for participating in the IES, and difficulties for actors to understand each other due to different domain knowledge.

The paper aims to examine how users come into play in developing a digital business platform. User involvement in a successful Swedish digital transaction platform serving buyers and sellers of secondhand items is investigated using interviews and observations. The study contributes to user involvement literature and the emergent literature on digital platforms as socio-technical systems by showing how digital platforms attend to what we refer to as active and passive user involvement. The findings highlight the importance of investing in personal user relationships and spending significant time and effort to learn from data collected through several tools and sources. The paper also questions the traditional product development process and its emphasis on front-loading. It discusses back-loading, i.e., time and effort spent postlaunch, as an alternative approach to meet the platform's need for agility and speed and continuous improvement and updates.

Electric vehicles are capturing ever larger market shares of the new vehicle market in several large vehicle markets such as Europe and China. However, electric vehicles still only make up a small fraction of the total vehicle fleet. Much research has been focused on the perspective of existing or prospective adopters of Electric Vehicles. Less emphasis has been placed on intermediaries such as vehicle salespeople, who could be important mediators in the product matching process by providing helpful information, facilitating direct experience and directly influencing vehicle buyers' adoption decisions. This paper addresses this research gap using a qualitative investigation of vehicle salespeople at OEMs who sell both Electric Vehicles and Internal Combustion Engine Vehicles on the Swedish market. Fifteen interviews with vehicle salespeople at leading OEMs were conducted in the fall of 2017. The results reveal that the sales process of vehicles is mainly focused on the sales of Internal Combustion Engine Vehicles. Electric Vehicles are treated as niche products which often require the vehicle buyer to initiate the sales process. It can be concluded that OEMs, dealerships and vehicle salespeople have taken relatively few steps to influence mainstream buyers to consider Electric Vehicles as an alternative to Internal Combustion Engine Vehicles at the point of sale. Possible reasons for the bias towards Internal Combustion Engine Vehicles can be found in the apparent lack of training and experience regarding Electric Vehicles among vehicle salespeople, more extended sales and delivery times for Electric Vehicles and a commission structure that often favours Internal Combustion Engine Vehicles.

Electric vehicles have thus far only captured a small share of the vehicle market. Much research has been focused on the perspective of existing or prospective adopters of Electric Vehicles. Less emphasis has been placed on intermediaries such as vehicle salespeople, who could be an important mediator in the product matching process by providing useful information, facilitating direct experience and having a direct influence on adoption decisions of vehicle buyers. This paper addresses this research gap by means of a qualitative investigation of vehicle salespeople at OEMs who sell both Electric Vehicles and Internal Combustion Engine Vehicles on the Swedish market. 15 interviews with vehicle salespeople at leading OEMs were conducted in the fall of 2017. The results reveal that the sales process of vehicles is mainly focused on the sales of Internal Combustion Engine Vehicles. Electric Vehicles are treated as a niche product which often requires the vehicle buyer to initiate the sales process. It can be concluded that relatively few steps have been taken by OEMs, dealerships and vehicle salespeople to influence mainstream buyers to consider Electric Vehicles as an alternative to Internal Combustion Engine Vehicles at the point of sale. Possible reasons for the bias towards Internal Combustion Engine Vehicles can be found in the apparent lack of training and experience regarding Electric Vehicles among vehicle salespeople, longer sales and delivery times for Electric Vehicles and a commission structure that that often favors Internal Combustion Engine Vehicles.

Reducing private car commuting is necessary for decarbonisation of cities; meanwhile, new shared mobility services provide an alternative to cars for daily commuting proposing a transition of user behaviour towards more sustainable mobility practices. In this paper, we investigate changes in everyday life practices when private car commuting is replaced with a shared mobility alternative, integrating lightweight small size electric vehicles (LEVs) in a peer-to-peer shared mobility service. Through a living lab experiment, a long-term empirical study with 16 individual households in Sweden was conducted employing a mixed methods approach. Using social practice theory as an analytical lens, we interrogate in depth the process of change in users’ everyday lives to understand challenges in integrating shared mobility services into everyday practice, and the implications for transition towards sustainable mobility practices from a user's everyday life point of view. The results show that a new mobility service can play a role in reconfiguring the meaning of private car commuting in terms of its related impacts, as well as increase knowledge and trust in sustainable alternatives. However, integrating shared mobility services in everyday practices showed that it became difficult to manage after six months, particularly for users with children. Our study demonstrates that current everyday life logistics, time affluence, and effort requirements are critical variables for enabling practice changes towards more sustainable mobility alternatives, such as a light electric vehicle sharing service. To enable people to reduce private car use, a more integrated and systemic design approach is needed for alternatives to become competitive with the notion of cars in everyday mobility.

Low-carbon mobility alternatives, such as shared services integrating light electric vehicles, support transitions to sustainable transport systems. However, new products and services are not enough, as changes must also incorporate the practices of travelling, infrastructure, and mobility cultures in which users of mobility solutions are core stakeholders. This paper argues that userinvolvement is necessary in sustainable innovation processes but that the expected diversity of user roles and their involvement can also lead to contrasting outcomes for sustainable innovation transitions. Guided by theory in user involvement, this study investigated users and nonusers of light electric vehicles in a sharing mobility service system set up as living lab in two large workplaces in Sweden. Fifty-one interviews with employees at the workplaces were conducted during the implementation process and analysed combined with a questionnaire and data from system tracking through sensor technology. The paper finds that both users and non-users are co-creators in building momentum for sustainable mobility alternatives and provides a spectrum of user roles with defined characteristics. Four roles are distinguished within this spectrum: vigilant users, passive collaborators, active decision makers and ambassadors. We suggest that a convergent activation strategy is deployed for involving a full spectrum of users in order to capture their insights in ways that positively affect transition. Such a strategy addresses users and non-users as part of decision-making concerning alternatives and cultivates a culture of user collaboration, while also enabling a plurality of contributions in order to challenge existing regimes and established practices among individuals

Sustainability driven innovations differ from current established technologies imposing new

requirements on users and often interdependent with other actors’ changes. Strategic Niche Management

(SNM) stresses interactions between actors through niches i.e. protected spaces for experimentation to

support innovation. However, it is unclear what activities are necessary when different actors are

involved in developing and diffusing sustainability innovation. This paper aims at identifying activities

crucial for sustainability innovation in an implemented mobility project. The results show that cocreation

through iterations and reflections by combinations of diverse actors and users can be considered

a core process for sustainability innovation. Six activities are identified as critical: matching the

interdependencies by combining the actors’ diverse competences and resources; facilitating to steer the

group of actors into actions; engaging users at early stages of innovation; trying to drive change by

offering the users an opportunity; co-creating through a multitude of actors with the development and

usage simultaneously; steering and facilitating to enable co-creation.

The aim of this paper is to explore how mainstream vehicle buyers perceive and apply Total Cost of Ownership in their vehicle choice process. All else equal, rational consumers ought to evaluate Total Cost of Ownership in order to acquire the real cost of owning a particular vehicle under consideration, unless bounded rationality is affecting their behavior. The results reveal that vehicle buyers generally are capable of understanding the relative size of indi- vidual costs that make up vehicle Total Cost of Ownership but fail to evaluate and apply multiple costs in their vehicle purchase process. Regression analysis exposes that income, educational level, stated importance of Total Cost of Ownership and the number of vehicles in the choice set have a positive asso- ciation with the degree that consumers conduct an evaluation of vehicle Total Cost of Ownership. Failure to consider Total Cost of Ownership can lead to uneconomic vehicle choices, which is here labeled as the TCO paradox. This could have an especially negative effect on the diffusion of battery electric ve- hicles, which require a more detailed cost analysis in order to extract its low operating cost structure.

This paper addresses the constellation of various actors from private and public

sectors represented by three companies, a municipality, a non-profit

organization, a research lab and users to collaborate on bringing forward a

sustainability driven disruptive innovation. The purpose of the paper is to

investigate how the various actors’ interests and contributions influence the

management of the collaboration setup and what barriers and enablers boost or

impede the outcome of the setup, i.e. deploying an innovation with sustainability

promise. We argue that the alignment of diverse actors’ interests and aims for

the innovation in collaborative settings is crucial for the collaboration to lead to

desirable outcomes. However, only alignment at an abstract level cannot ensure

success even when actors bring competencies that balance the innovation

requirements. Rather, creating cohesion and commitment of all actors

simultaneously at a concrete level is necessary. The integration of new

approaches to collaboration such as design methods may strengthen

commitment despite actors coming from different organizational cultures and

traditions.