Infrastructural Innovation: Flexibility, Generativity and the Mobile Internet

This paper addresses issues related to how to enable broadest possible innovative activities by infrastructural technology design. In this paper, we focus on the development of high level services based on mobile telecommunication technologies which we for matters of simplicity term the development of a Mobile Internet. The focus of our analysis is how features of the technology itself enable or constrain innovations. We do so by looking at 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