Infrastructural Innovation: Flexibility, Generativity and the Mobile Internet

This article addresses issues related to how to enable broadest possible innovative activities by infrastructural technology design. The authors focus on the development of high level services based on mobile telecommunication technologies. The focus of their analysis is how features of the technology enable or constrain innovations. They do so by looking at 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 innovations 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. The analysis also points out important differences between the Internet and the existing Mobile Internet regarding technological constrains on innovations. It points out important ways in which powerful actors’ strategies inhibit innovations and how they embed their strategies into the technology and creates technological barriers for innovation.