Technoligical Life Cycles Regional Clusters Facing Disruption

The phenomenon of technological life cycles is argued to be of great importance in the development of regional clusters. New 'disruptive' technologies may initiate the emergence of new regional industrial clusters and/or create new opportunities for further development of existing ones. However, they may also result in stagnation and decline of the latter. The term disruptive refers to such significant changes in the basic technologies that may change the industrial landscape, even in the shorter run. The paper examines the key features of a regional cluster, where the economic development patterns are quite closely related to the emergence of new key technologies.Technological life cycles, regional clusters, communication technology

Broadband: Europe needs more than DSL

Efficient broadband technologies such as DSL, fibre, cable modem, powerline communications, UMTS, WLAN or WiMax are powerful locational factors for an economy. Europe in particular should promote broadband communication further to tap into its growth potential. But given the prevailing ownership structures in fixed wire business, the promotion of broadband must not concentrate exclusively on DSL. Rather, its impact should be technology-neutral.communications, technology, broadband, DSL, cable modem, FTTH, regulation authority, liberalisation, deregulation, convergence

Exploring the WISP Industry - Swiss Case Study

Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN) are receiving considerable attention in the industry and are perceived as a possible disruptive technology, capable of posing a credible threat to the dominance of mobile network operators and their 3G networks. In spite of this, the business aspects of public WLANs have been neglected by the research community. The objective of this paper is thus to investigate the use of WLAN to offer wireless services from a business point of view. The study is based on the example of current supply of WLAN services in Switzerland. By investigating different kinds of WLAN service providers and analyzing their business models through mini case studies, the paper provides a deeper insight into business aspects of public WLANs. 1

Wireless LAN 802.11x in U.S. Educational Institutions: Technology Adoption and Digital Divide Perspective

The current study of wireless local area networks (WLAN) adoption in educational institutions is motivated by three reasons. First, most students are exposed to information technology when they are at K-12 schools. Indeed, educational institutions represent the largest segment in the WLAN market in the United States in terms of the number of adopters. Second, WLAN requires a substantial financial investment before it can enable an anytime, anywhere learning environment, and may thereby aggravate the digital divide between rich and poor schools. Third, although WLAN is infrastructure technology, it has different characteristics compared to other infrastructure information technologies; traditional infrastructure information technologies are mostly located such that they are transparent to the users, whereas WLAN is close to end users, so that they directly experience benefits related to mobility and convenience, which eventually impacts organization boundary and business processes. Recognizing the importance of WLAN and its difference from traditional infrastructure information technologies, this dissertation examines how WLAN adoption (i.e., whether or not to adopt WLAN) and deployment (i.e., the extent to which WLAN is used) are influenced by technological, environmental, organizational factors, socio-economic, and policy-related factors. It is based on an online survey of principals of 435 K-12 elementary, middle, and high schools in Missouri, including 190 adopters of WLAN and 245 schools that have not adopted WLAN. The results indicate that perceived benefit is not a significant predictor of WLAN adoption. Unlike previous research, satisfaction with current wired system positively affects WLAN adoption. Some of socio-economic variables also affect adoption of WLAN. Schools near urbanized areas are more likely to adopt WLAN than the schools near rural areas. Furthermore, the government and state subsidy E-rate positively affect WLAN adoption. When examining the determinants of WLAN deployment, perceived benefits of using WLAN significantly affect WLAN usage. Moreover, perceived benefits and barriers strongly affect satisfaction with WLAN, which in turn affects WLAN usage. Satisfaction from using WLAN significantly mediates the effect of various antecedent factors on WLAN usage. Implications of the results for IS researchers, practitioners, marketers, and policy makers are discussed and future avenues of the study are examined

Agricultural Trade Liberalization, Productivity Gain and Poverty Alleviation: a General Equilibrium Analysis

Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) models have gained continuously in popularity as an empirical tool for assessing the impact of trade liberalization on agricultural growth, poverty and income distribution. Conventional models ignore however the channels linking technical change in agriculture, trade openness and poverty. This study seeks to incorporate econometric evidence of these linkages into a CGE model to estimate the impact of alternative trade liberalization scenarios on poverty and equity. The analysis uses the Latent Class Stochastic Frontier Model (LCSFM) and the metafrontier function to investigate the influence of trade openness on agricultural technological change. The estimated productivity effects induced from higher levels of trade are combined with a general equilibrium analysis of trade liberalization to evaluate the income and prices changes. These effects are then used to infer the impact on poverty and inequality following the top-down approach. The model is applied to Tunisian data using the social accounting matrix of 2001 and the 2000 household expenditures surveys. Poverty is found to decline under agricultural and full trade liberalization and this decline is much more pronounced when the productivity effects are included.Openness, Agriculture, Productivity, Poverty, CGE modeling

Determinants for a generic mobile commerce transformation framework

Current technological advancement has given the necessary impetus for businesses to transform from traditional ways into to mobile business or m-businesses. This transformation has begun from the Internet era, where traditional businesses transformed to e-businesses by taking advantages of the facilities offered by the Internet. Recent development in wireless technology facilitated businesses to move further to m-businesses. Despite the development in the technical domain, it appears that businesses still struggle to comprehend the processes involved in the transformation because a proper framework is yet to evolve. This work-in-progress paper provides a background to such transformation with a method to achieve this transformation

Business Innovation Strategies to Reduce the Revenue Gap for Wireless Broadband Services

Mobile broadband is increasing rapidly both when it comes to traffic and number of subscriptions. The swift growth of the demand will require substantial capacity expansions. Operators are challenged by the fact that revenues from mobile broadband are limited, just a few per cent of APRU, and thus not compensating for declining voice revenues, creating a so called "revenue gap". Concurrently, mobile broadband dominates the traffic, set to grow strongly. In this paper we analyze the potential of different strategies for operators to reduce or bridge the revenue gap. The main options are to reduce network costs, to increase access prices and to exploit new revenue streams. The focus in the paper is on cost & capacity challenges and solutions in the network domain. Operators can cooperate and share sites and spectrum, which could be combined with off-loading heavy traffic to less costly local networks. In the network analysis we illustrate the cost impacts of different levels of demand, re-use of existing base station sites, sharing of base stations and spectrum and deployment of a denser network. A sensitivity analysis illustrates the impact on total revenues if access prices are increased, whether new types of services generate additional revenues, and if it fills the revenue gap. Our conclusion is that the different technical options to reduce the revenue gap can be linked to business strategies that include cooperation with both other operators as well as with non-telecom actors. Hence, innovations in the business domain enable technical solutions to be better or fully exploited.Wireless Internet access, data traffic, revenues, network costs, spectrum, deployment strategies, HSPA, LTE, operator cooperation, value added services, NFC, B2B2C.