Diffusion of mobile Internet services

Abstract

Mobile Internet is an outcome of the merging of two significant domains of technological innovation over recent years: mobile/wireless and the Internet. This merging will lead to new forms of end-user behaviour and also provide business opportunities for companies from the converging telecommunications, IT/Internet, and media industries. The diffusion of technological innovations is widely discussed in the literature. However, applications of the diffusion theory to mobile services have mostly concentrated on mobile telephony, and considered this diffusion to result from end-user adoption decisions that are made independently of other innovations. In contrast, the thesis of this dissertation is that the diffusion of mobile Internet services as systemic technological innovations depends on a cluster of separate but interrelated technology components that diffuse interdependently due to both demand-driven adoption and supply-driven dissemination.

This research was conducted using quantitative research data on mobile handsets and services collected from Finland during the years 2005-2009. The diffusion of mobile Internet services was found to depend on the generic technology components of mobile services: devices, applications, networks, and content. These components form an interrelated cluster of technologies. Consequently, direct market actor influence over a specific technology component has indirect effects on the other generic components, and, thereby, also influences the diffusion of mobile Internet services.

This dissertation contributes to the fields of innovation diffusion and mobile services research. Firstly, a general approach for planning and forecasting technology product evolution and new product feature diffusion was developed by isolating the previously unexplored phenomenon of product feature dissemination and linking it to the known phenomena of product category diffusion and product unit replacement. Secondly, observations on the diffusion of systemic technological innovations were made in the context of mobile Internet services related to component technology interdependence, market actor dissemination efforts, and end-user assimilation gaps. Thirdly, the fundamental differences of alternative methods to measure mobile service usage as well as the data provided by them were identified, and a holistic framework for analysing the usage of mobile services was developed. Fourthly, novel research methods and data were utilised.