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Understanding when entrants might have an advantage over an industry’s incumbent firms in developing and adopting new technologies is a question which several scholars have explained in terms of technological capabilities or organizational dynamics. This paper proposes that the value network—the context within which a firm competes and solves customers’ problems—is an important factor affecting whether incumbent or entrant firms will most successfully innovate. In a study of technology development in the disk drive industry, the authors found that incumbents led the industry in developing and adopting new technologies of every sort identified by earlier scholars—at component and architectural levels; competency-enhancing and competency-destroying; incremental and radical—as long as the technology addressed customers’ needs within the value network in which the incumbents competed. Entrants led in developing and adopting technologies which addressed user needs in different, emerging value networks. It is in these innovations, which disrupted established trajectories of technological progress in established markets, that attackers proved to have an advantage. The rate of improvement in product performance which technologists provide may exceed the rate of improvement demanded in established markets. This mismatch between trajectories enables firms entering emerging value networks subsequently to attack the industry’s established markets as well.

For students who are blind or visually impaired, technology enables greater access to the educational curriculum, immediate and independent access to information, and full participation in community and citizenship. This chapter reviews research on technology use by students with visual impairments, and highlights effective practices, promising developments, and ongoing challenges. The authors discuss the implications of these advancements on policy, instruction, professional development, and future research.

Rather than organize as traditional firms, many of today’s companies organize as platforms that sit at the nexus of multiple exchange and production relationships. This chapter considers a most basic question of organization in platform contexts: the choice of boundaries. Herein, I investigate how classical economic theories of firm boundaries apply to platform-based organization and empirically study how executives made boundary choices in response to changing market and technical challenges in the early mobile computing industry (the predecessor to today’s smartphones). Rather than a strict or unavoidable tradeoff between “openness-versus-control,” most successful platform owners chose their boundaries in a way to simultaneously open-up to outside developers while maintaining coordination across the entire system.

In the recent past, mobile technologies that track the movement of people, freight and vehicles have evolved rapidly. The major categories of such technologies are reviewed and a number of attributes for classification are proposed. The willingness of people to engage in such technologically based surveys and the reported biases in the make-up of the sample obtained are reviewed. Lessons are drawn about the nature of the samples that can be achieved and the representativeness of such samples is discussed. Data processing is addressed, particularly in terms of the processing requirements for logged data, where additional travel characteristics required for travel analysis may need to be imputed. Another issue explored is the reliability of data entered by respondents in interactive devices and concerns that may arise in processing data collected in real time for prompting or interrogating respondents. Differences, in relation to the data user, between data from mobile devices and data from conventional self-report surveys are discussed. Potentials that may exist for changes in modelling from using such data are explored. Conclusions are drawn about the usefulness and limitations of mobile technologies to collect and process data. The extent to which such mobile technologies may be used in future, either to supplement or replace conventional methods of data collection, is discussed along with the readiness of the technology for today and the advances that may be expected in the short and medium term from this form of technology.

New mobile platforms, connected seamlessly to the Internet via wireless access, become increasingly more powerful as each day passes. Smartphones and tablet computers, as well as other ultraportable devices, have already gained enough critical mass to be considered mainstream devices, being present in the daily lives of millions of higher education students. Whole firms, devoted solely to developing high-quality and high engagement content to these devices, have emerged, populating an application market of thousands of teaching applications (apps) focused on diverse higher education topics, from physics and calculus to anatomy and law. Many universities throughout the world have already adopted or are planning to adopt mobile technologies in many of their courses as a better way to connect students with the subjects they are studying. These new mobile platforms allow students to access content anywhere/anytime to immerse himself/herself into that content (alone or interacting with teachers or colleagues via web communication forms) and to interact with that content in ways that were not previously possible (via touch and voice recognition technologies, for instance). The study of such technologies and their possible uses for higher education, as well as the impacts they can have on stimulating more active participation and engagement with the course subjects and research in higher education, while at the same time fostering collaboration among students and even different institutions, is the goal of the proposed chapter. Through the evaluation of the teacher/student acceptance and adoption of such mobile technologies, this chapter plans to provide a thorough overview of the possibilities and consequences of mobile learning in higher education environments as a gateway to ubiquitous learning – perhaps the ultimate form of learner engagement, since it allows the student to learn, access and interact with important content in any way or at any time or place she/he might want.

The use of portable computers connected to high-speed networks is changing the way groups do their work. Such systems reduce the need for teams to be co-located by allowing team members to communicate with one another and access a wide range of databases. Despite the growing use of such systems, relatively little research has looked broadly at how these systems affect aspects of group process and performance. We interviewed individuals in 10 firms that are implementing mobile computing in work groups. Based on those interviews, we describe how mobile computing is changing interdependent work and speculate on how it may influence job scope and team empowerment, group composition, supervisory practices, and socialization processes. We also conclude that attention to both the functional and informal characteristics of knowledge management systems associated with mobile computing can influence group processes and performance.