Infrastructural Innovation and Generative Information Infrastructures

This chapter addresses issues related to how to enable the broadest possible innovative activities by infrastructural technology design. The authors focus on the development of high-level services based on mobile telecommunication technologies that for matters of simplicity are termed the development of a Mobile Internet. The focus of the analysis is how features of the technology itself enable or constrain innovations. The authors do this by looking on a few embryos of the Mobile Internet (primarily the Norwegian CPA platform, but also two pre-CPA platforms in Norway and Japan’s i-mode) through the concepts of end-to-end architecture, programmability of terminals, and generativity. This analysis illustrates that the change from closed infrastructures like MobilInfo and SMSinfo to more open ones like CPA and i-mode increased the speed and range of innovation substantially. At the same time, the differences between CPA and i-mode regarding programmability of terminals and the billing service provided by the CPA network enabling the billing of individual transactions also contributed to basically the same speed and range of innovations around CPA as i-mode in spite of the huge differences in investments into the networks made by the owners. However, the analysis also points out important differences between the Internet and the existing Mobile Internet regarding technological constraints on innovations. It points out important ways in which powerful actors’ strategies inhibit innovations, and how they embed their strategies into the technology and, accordingly, create technological barriers for innovation. Ole Hanseth University of Oslo, Norway Petter Nielsen Telenor Research and Future Studies, Norway