Mobile Services in the Networked Economy

The mobile services industry is going through a major transformation, which challenges many of the basic assumptions behind the existing business models. As the business paradigm shifts from voice-centric to data-centric mobile services, the ways of analyzing the industry need to evolve as well. Mobile Services in the Networked Economy provides new insight into the structure and dynamics of the mobile services industry by combining novel ideas from the complexity theory, from the research of vertical integration strategies and from the theories of networked organizations. These ideas and theories are then applied to the context of three different types of mobile services markets in Japan, Finland and the UK. The case analyses demonstrate how the three markets are currently going through very distinct phases of evolution in a continuum between two very different kinds of business environments. The analysis of the mobile services industry presented in this book will help the reader not only to understand the logic behind the way the industry looks today, but also to foresee possible future trends in the development of a given mobile services market.