The Information Economy: technological innovation and innovative forms of organizations

Among the Information-based industries, the telecommunications industry is widely recognized as one of the most important in the global economy.When focusing on a mere technological aspect, it clearly emerges that the advent of Internet was another important revolution that affected the Telecoms Industry. It can be stated that Mobile Internet has been brought to life by the union of two of the fastest-growing industries in the economy (Mobile Telephony and Data Communications). Under these assumptions, an insightful analysis of this industry is required, and a clear understanding of the new competitive challenges and the prospect strategic behaviors would be crucial both for the industrial actors competing in the industry, and for the academic research that deals with the strategic management and business organization.
As far as the empirical setting is concerned, the thesis were developed with respect the Mobile Telecommunications industry. Interestingly enough, in fact, when I started my PhD program, the industry was shaken by the introduction of a highly innovative technology. Nevertheless, there was no consensus neither on the trajectory of the technology diffusion, or on its disruptive power. Indeed, an acrimonious debate was fed about the future of the overall industry.
Truthfully, the evolutionary approach behind my research makes it clear that changes within the industry have been made possible by the intersection of two forces, such as technological innovations and the emergence of new concepts amid coopetition and cooperation . The primary goal of my research is thus is to contribute to the theoretical understanding of how Information-based techno-economic systems, emerge and evolve. In particular, I maintain that value could be created when operators contribute to set up a unique innovation system.
In the light of the Information Economy principles, the strategic management innovation deals with setting standards, among other issues. This phenomenon seems to be even more verified in high tech fields. Generally speaking, theoretical speculations about mobile technology lag behind the technological development. Only recently, a growing part of the academic interest has been directed either to mobile devices adoption and diffusion, or to the business models behind the industry.
With respect to the questions related to the Information diffusion models, through the use of the statistical software Marketing Engineering, I compared the forecasting of the selected theoretical models with the results of my personal rounds of interviews with expert practitioners in the field . As a result, the incongruence of the theoretical model is shown, and a possible explanation is formulated. This is based on the Information Economy principles, and a first tentative introduction of the supply-side perspective is proposed.
With respect to corporate strategies in the Information Economy, to the best of my knowledge, I found that few or no research has been done to investigate the broad corporate strategies that should provide new and incumbent operators with sustainable competitive advantage in the mobile industry. Indeed the latter shows peculiar characteristics, which should count for specific competitive choices and behavior. In fact, m-commerce can be seen as the “second wave” in the business revolution, whereas Internet (or e-commerce) was the “first wave,” giving birth to the digital economy era.
As far as the industrial interrelations are concerned, the theoretical framework that I refer to mandates to assess the interrelations among actors in the industry. In particular, those actors should configure a value constellation, in order to realize value offerings for the end users. Indeed, such a cooperative approach is not always faithful to the actual industrial setting.
In order to better understand the reasons behind this discrepancy, I adopted the Business Model approach, which has gained more and more consensus over the time by researchers in the Information-based industries. My research shows that it is possible to distinguish between two typologies of business models. I refer to them as the open business model, and the proprietary business model. I analyzed them with respect to the Italian setting, with the aim of analyzing the dynamics behind the industrial interrelations
Referring back to the framework proposed from Galbraith, and introduced in the theoretical picture, it is possible to assert that not only the organizations needs to be distinguished between their innovative and operating components, but that the innovative organization, in a competitive context in which integration of complementary resources becomes strategic factor, needs to cooperate with other innovative organizations in the field of reference.
From this perspective, our contribution resides in proposing the open network model as a possible locus in order to realize such encounters.