Coopetition for Mobile Service Provisioning Is it about infrastructures, services or both?

Abstract: As a means of enhancing our everyday lives, ICT industry has caused and experienced significant transformations during past two decades. This transformation relates to technological advances within ICT, and beyond the ICT ecosystem. Wireless ICT is also not an exception in this regard. Accordingly, if we consider Internet of Things (IoT) as the main enabler for transformation, M2M is then the technological enabler of IoT that represent the Wireless ICT in the process of transformation.In this thesis we benefit from the concept of Smart City as a place where Wireless ICT participates for digitalizing other industries. We investigate how smartification is taking place, where our findings show that wireless ICT mainly empowers other industries to provide M2M-enabled services. Consequently, this participation imposes major changes on the wireless ICT ecosystem itself. Therefore, we study the changes that are forming the “future wireless ICT”. We have studied cases from smart cities, and 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 ARA model and Five Forces framework.Finally, we argue that traditional actors (i.e. MNOs & Vendors), first have to adopt value co-creation in new businesses. This means cooperation among these actors, which changes the Seller-Buyer relationship to Supplier-Customer, in which they co-create the value. Accordingly, we argue that the linear processes of creating value are inefficient in these new markets and value networks must be adopted instead. 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 discuss the logic behind vertical coopetition while comparing it with horizontal coopetition.