Shared electric mobility concept

KONE wants to understand future opportunities for shared electric mobility solutions and their business models on a community level.

Three questions KONE wants to know:

• Concept: What would be a shared e-mobility solution to support residents’ sustainable behaviors in Espoo?
• User: what are the potential communities for shared e-mobility?
• Business: how is a viable business model achieved?

‍To answer these questions, our team divided the project into 2 phases:

• Research: identify the potential users and their problems in this project context
• Design: co-create a service concept with multiple stakeholders to tackle the users’ problems, then propose a business model for the new service

We spent 3 months conducting these research activities.

Field research

We observed the common transportation modes, including bikes, cars, buses, and metro, in Espoo areas.

Our objectives were to get some contexts of:

• How residents are moving around different Espoo areas?
• What is the current infrastructure of e-mobility in these areas?

Specifically, our team needed to answer the questions below in the observation form.

1. What transportation did you use to arrive here? What were your options? What app or other service did you use for the journey? How much did it cost?
2. What did you notice when you first entered the neighborhood and when you were moving around(offices, bike racks, electric charging stations, etc.)? Add important points to the map.
3. What transportation are you using to leave the area? What choices are available?
4. What parts of your journey were easy and what parts of your journey were difficult?
5. How was the rest of your experience? Suggestion: Write extra observations down, including how the area looked, sounded like, even smelled like and how others moved around you.

Expert interviews

We interviewed eight experts to gather insights about the following topics: sustainable mobility, autonomous vehicles, electric cars, and mobility as a service

Survey

We sent three surveys to residents living in Helsinki Metropolitan Area to understand their daily mobility behaviors

Focus group interviews

I facilitated two online focus groups with:

1. Residents in the Leppävaara area → to understand their mobility behavior and challenges
2. Users who often use shared vehicle services → to understand their problems and motivations when using these services

Research results

After the research phase, we gathered together to analyze the data.

Then, we concluded with a detailed report on many aspects of shared e-mobility in the Espoo region.

In short, we identified that residents living in the same or nearby apartment buildings could be potential users. Their problems and possible solutions are summarized below.

After the research, we co-designed the new concept with users and the company.

Co-design with users

I facilitated two workshops to co-create with potential users new mobility concepts.

Co-design with KONE

We co-created the concept with KONE representatives to ensure that the solution concepts are feasible and viable for KONE to implement.

For this concept to work, we introduced housing management companies to the ecosystem with KONE and residents.

The team was able to define why a housing management company would be willing to co-create this service concept with KONE.

1. Parking is expensive. Suppose the residents use more shared vehicles and fewer parking spaces. Housing companies can have more space to build more apartments.
2. Shared electric vehicles can be a selling point. It can attract more residents to live inthe buildings and pay more rent. Indeed, some new buildings in Kalasatama alreadyoffer this service.
3. Reduce expenses. Housing companies can receive discounts from KONE servicessuch as installment and maintenance.

The final concept is a KONE E-mobility platform.

The KONE E-mobility platform is an electric vehicle management system for housing cooperatives.

It allows the housing cooperatives to manage their electric vehicles (cars, bikes, scooters, and more) and their residents to view, book, and share electric vehicles within their building communities.

We used different visual techniques to communicate our concept to different stakeholders.

Presentation:

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Storyboard and illustrations:

Our video presentation among other team projects:

Our presentation starts at 1:56:40 in the video.

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1. Our team was able to identify the potential users and their problems in the project context, then design the service concept and business model.
2. The service concept was later selected to present in the SPACRS, an EU-funded project.
3. (Personal) I continued working with the same KONE team after this project as a master’s thesis worker. This university-collaboration project is usually a place for companies to recruit talents while they’re still in school.

#1: Conduct a research project to explore and identify the users’ problems

The team started the project with an opportunity statement, so we needed to identify the problems potential users were facing and how we could solve these problems. The project scope is also vague, thus creating a lot of uncertainties at the beginning. This project taught me to make a research process to explore the context and define users’ problems. Specifically, the process consisted of various activities, including field research, interviews, surveys, and

I also had extra responsibility as a team project manager, so I learned to plan the research timeline and objectives. For example, I realized desk research could be more time-saving than expert interviews to learn about technical challenges.

#2: Communicate a service concept to multiple stakeholders

A service is often intangible and contains many touchpoints, so it is challenging to describe a service concept. In the project, I learned to use a combination of storyboards, user journeys, and visual images to present a service concept to stakeholders from multiple backgrounds.

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