A Foresight Framework for Understanding the Future of Mobile Commerce

The emerging markets of mobile commerce are calling for potential successful products and services. This process is challenging all actors of the mobile commerce industry (MCI). Learning from the future and discovering a route to a desired future are keys to successful mobile commerce business. In this paper we argue that it is very important that all actors in the MCI use an industry foresight approach in order to discover a successful route to future markets. We present a framework for creating industry foresights and for understanding the future of mobile commerce. We focus on the mobile commerce industry as a whole and introduce two broad variables; (1) adoption and diffusion of mobile commerce products and services; and (2) the macro economic development trend. Based on these variables we build four foresight scenarios: Rapid-up, Rapid-down, Slowdown and Slow-up. Based on product feature characteristics in each of these four different scenarios we suggest some features of promising mobile commerce products and services. As our research moves further on, we will use informationgathering agents for collecting information for our analysis.