Coopetition for Mobile Service Provisioning

As a means of enhancing our everyday lives, as well as a tool for digitalizing other industries, the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) industry has caused and experienced significant transformations during the past two decades. On one hand, this transformation relates to technological advances within ICT, and on the other hand it goes beyond the ICT ecosystem. Wireless ICT, as a subcategory of ICT, is also not an exception in this regard. Accordingly, if we consider Internet of Things (IoT) as the main enabler for digitalization, Machine to Machine communications (M2M) is then the technological enabler of IoT that represent the Wireless ICT in the process of transforming other industries. Looking into the role of ICT as a transformation tool, in this thesis we benefit from the concept of Smart City as a place where Wireless ICT participates for digitalizing other industries. We look into cases from smart city and investigate how smartification is taking place, where our findings show that wireless ICT mainly empowers other industries to provide M2M-enabled services for the citizens of smart cities. Consequently, this participation imposes major changes on the wireless ICT ecosystem itself. Therefore we study the changes that are forming the “future wireless ICT”, in the presence of other industrial service providers. In this process these service providers are considered as the new entrants to the wireless ICT ecosystem. In order to collect data, besides a thorough literature review, we have studied four cases from two major building blocks of smart cities: a) Intelligent Transportation Systems, and b) Digital Built Environment. We also expanded our data collection by performing semi-structured interviews with experts and decision makers, as well as participating in multiple projects and workshops. Accordingly, we have benefited from two major theories for analyzing the collected data; namely Actors-Resources-Activities (ARA) model and Porter’s Five Forces framework. The Analyses then have resulted in presenting cooperation and competition points in the future wireless ICT. We argue that traditional wireless ICT actors (i.e. mobile network operators & telecom equipment vendors), first have to adopt value co-creation methods in new businesses they enter, such as IoT in smart cities. This means cooperation among these actors, which takes the Seller-Buyer relationship to the next level that is Supplier-Customer, in which both sides collaborate on co-creating the value. Accordingly, we argue that the linear processes of creating value, adopted from traditional wireless ICT ecosystem, are ine cient in these new markets and value networks must be adopted instead. We discuss business relationships among major involved entities in the new value networks, while striving to describe their complexity. As a result, we introduce “vertical coopetition” as a dominant business relationship among traditional actors, and new entrants in future wireless ICT. As the main contribution of this thesis, we finally discuss the logic behind vertical coopetition while comparing it with the other (better-known) description of coopetition, which is cooperation among competitors (horizontal coopetition).