Abstract

The Finnish taxi industry has already long been technologically developed, and since 2011 taxi hailing apps have been available in Finland. The amount of these apps has steadily increased, spurred by the arrival of Uber and Taxify in Finland in 2014, and by the de-regulation of the Finnish taxi industry in July 2018. In the present paper, the aim was to identify ridehailing app acquisition related strategies that traditional Finnish dispatch organizations (DOs) employ. A qualitative case study with five focus organizations was conducted between 2018–2020. This study contributes to extant research in two ways. First, by identifying five ride-hailing app strategies employed by DOs (three related to the question of make vs. buy, two related to discontinuing/selling). Second, by showing that different ridehailing apps can play different strategic roles — which helps explain DOs’ multihoming strategy — and that the strategic role of a specific ride-hailing app can change over time.