Abstract:
Individual and business consumers are increasingly adopting mobile devices and mobile
services. Technology research in taking its usual cow paths has predominantly focused on the
consumer adoption of mobile phones and mobile services. There is a somewhat silence in
research on how firms in the mobile technology ecosystem develop these mobile services for
consumption or adoption by individuals and businesses. This silence is more severe for
mobile business organisations (MBOs), which act as third-party mobile value-added service
(MVAS) providers/creators, as compared to mobile network operators. This study attempts to
address this imbalance. The study seeks to investigate how mobile business organisations
develop capabilities to provide mobile services (content and applications) for adoption by
individual and business consumers. Specifically, it engages a critical realism approach to
examine the type of m-business capabilities Ghanaian MBOs possess, how they use these
capabilities to create m-services for consumer and business adoption/consumption. A
prevailing theoretical approach for understanding how firms create capabilities from their
resources is the dynamic capability (DC) framework, which measures a firm’s propensity to
continue changing its resource base in response to its competitive environment. Based on the
DC framework, this study contributes a theoretically-based and empirically tested research
model to explain the how MBOs deploy and manage resources to create capabilities, going
beyond the generic frameworks that may not apply to the specific context of m-business. This
study also identifies a set of m-business capabilities that MBOs can draw on to become
market leaders or stay in competition. In addition, this study lends support to measuring the
impact of firms’ dynamic capabilities as either market-based impact or financial impact. This
helps to some extent to overcome the ambiguities of measuring overall firm performance
and/or competitive advantage.
