A foresight framework for understanding the future of mobile commerce

Abstract

The advent of the 3G world of mobile commerce has suffered from the wait‐and‐see mode over the last years. Existing barriers pose a challenge to all actors in the mobile commerce industry (MCI). Learning from the future and discovering a route to a desired future are keys to successful mobile commerce business. In this paper we argue that it is very important that all actors in the MCI use an industry foresight approach in order to discover a successful route to future markets. We present a framework for creating industry foresights and for understanding the future of mobile commerce. We focus on the mobile commerce industry as a whole and introduce two broad variables; (1) adoption and diffusion of mobile commerce products and services; and (2) the macro‐economic development trend. Based on these variables we build four foresight scenarios: Rapid‐Up, Rapid‐Down, Slow‐Down and Slow‐Up. On the basis of these four different scenarios we suggest some features of promising mobile commerce products and services. We are using information‐gathering agents in order to collect information for our analysis. The foresight framework will help all actors understand the future for m‐commerce.

Citation

Han, S., Harkke, V., Landor Ruggero, P. and de Mio, R. (2002), "A foresight framework for understanding the future of mobile commerce", Journal of Systems and Information Technology, Vol. 6 No. 2, pp. 19-40. https://doi.org/10.1108/13287260280000769