This thesis examines how Estonian construction small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can access global suppliers despite market-size constraints that make individual firms structurally too small to attract international attention. Estonia leads Europe in digital governance and SME digital adoption (European Commission, 2024), yet cross-border material procurement in the construction sector remains largely analogue, mediated by Nordic distributors who aggregate demand and absorb the regulatory and logistical burdens that small Estonian buyers cannot. The asymmetry between Estonia’s digital fluency in domestic affairs and its analogue dependency in cross-border material procurement is the empirical puzzle the thesis sets out to address.The research began with the visible problem of Tallinn’s ghost sites and rising housing costs during a third-semester Sustainable Transitions course at the University of Lapland’s Service Design Strategies and Innovation programme. Curiosity about why simple construction items appeared on Estonian invoices at two to three times typical European prices led to the discovery that Nordic suppliers operate as sophisticated aggregators marking up Asian-manufactured materials. Research into the Nordic supply-chain model surfaced names such as Kesko’s Onninen division and SSAB-owned Ruukki Construction as representative players. With guidance from an Export-Import consultant with twenty-five years of trade experience, I formulated a hypothesis that digital platforms could enable direct Asian sourcing for Estonian SMEs, leveraging Estonia’s X-Road and e-Residency infrastructure.An interview with bilateral trade expert Interviewee A on 2 April 2026 fundamentally re-framed this hypothesis. Three of Interviewee A’s observations produced a methodological pivot: Estonia is too small a market on its own to attract major Asian producers; platforms enable existing trade flows rather than create new ones; and the real barrier to cross-border trade is political alignment and trust, not technical interoperability. The interview also surfaced a cultural dimension previously unexamined: Estonian SMEs’ default toward Nordic suppliers is not only logistical but also identity-driven, a pattern that this thesis names the Nordic Yearning Barrier. A second interview with the Export-Import consultant, who happens to be the author’s father, deepened the pivot by documenting how broker-mediated pooling of small orders — the institutional layer that previously made small-volume Asian-Europe SME trade viable — has been broken by post-2023 CBAM tightening and COVID-era trust erosion.These insights produced a methodological pivot. The work shifted from designing a digital platform as the core intervention to designing a consortium aggregation service in which digital infrastructure plays a supporting rather than central role. The framework presented in Chapter 4 has three layers: foundational digital enablers (existing Estonian infrastructure relied upon, supplemented by platform precedents such as TradeShift and Pactum AI and by the regulatory infrastructure of CBAM and the EU–India FTA), a consortium aggregation service (the human-first core intervention, with sub-functions for demand pooling, trust brokerage, and CBAM-and-logistics handling), and system-level outcomes (bottlenecks the framework relieves and improvements it targets).A service blueprint, following Stickdorn et al.’s (2018) conventions and extending them with dual-sided front-stage actions (separate rows for SME-facing and supplier-facing actions), an emotional journey row capturing the SME’s confidence-and-anxiety arc, and explicit fail-points-and-recovery rows, specifies a single procurement cycle in enough detail to support a pilot. The cycle has five stages — Forecast & Convene, Specify & Aggregate, Source & Contract, Ship & Comply, and Deliver & Reconcile — with indicative durations totalling approximately fourteen to eighteen weeks for sea-freight cycles ex-India to Muuga.Total Landed Cost analysis demonstrates material-specific economics under the post-2026 CBAM regime: cement is best treated as a supply-resilience problem rather than a cost problem, given the high embedded emissions intensity of Asian-origin cement and the resulting CBAM cost; steel and aluminium offer eight to twelve per cent savings underaggregation. The thesis contributes a service-design account of cross-border SME aggregation grounded in an Estonian case, a methodologically transparent record of how a working hypothesis was tested and revised against expert testimony, and a complementary path to current EU CBAM simplification proposals — lifting SMEs above thresholds through aggregation rather than carving them out through de minimis exemption.