Innovation Management

Abstract

The establishment of a successful mobile payment service represents a major challenge for all of the prospective providers. To gain a sense for this, we need only to consider the multisided nature of the new business ecosystem, the complexity of the value-added chain, the successful convergence of the necessary industries and areas of technological know-how, the task of quickly resolving the chicken-and-egg conundrum and the delicate (if not impossible) task of securing the enthusiasm of retailers and customers from the beginning.

While the know-how of providers is usually limited to a particular market sector, mobile payment systems and their corresponding business ecosystems will require a level of cross-industry cooperation that can only be achieved in the framework of partnerships or mergers. This will enable the achievement of a certain degree of innovation. The most successful business models of the still-young Internet era (including the models deployed by the providers of existing mobile payment services) have all paid homage to the notion of open innovation74 as a source of ideas and as an approach to market development. This can be observed in the case of Apple, NTT DoCoMo (Osaifu-Keitai), SAP, Google and many other corporations.