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This work seeks to further our understanding on the management of innovations in network industries. Although the economics of network markets like telecommunications, Internet, email, media, computer, and service operations in banking, legal and airline industries have become a major field of economic research; knowledge about how to manage innovation within these markets is less advanced (HOBDAY et al. 2000: 793; CHESBROUGH 2003: 198). The goods and services of these industries regularly manifest themselves as complex system products, which are composed of multiple mutually dependent components and often supplied by different industries (HOBDAY 1998: 691; TIDD 1995: 308). Innovation processes associated with complex systems products, therefore, display a systemic character and the issue of how to coordinate the diverse but nevertheless complementary inputs poses a major challenge for innovation management.

The following chapter will provide an overview of some of the more pertinent work on the management of innovation in network industries. The intention here is to establish a basic understanding of the industry-specific nature of innovations and their challenges. By addressing the following questions it will also help to identify variables of interests that are related to the building blocks of the analytical framework (see Figure 1): What are the specific characteristics of network industries and how do these relate joint innovation projects? What kind of innovation types can be expected in network industries and what kind of innovational challenges do these types entail? What approaches exist to manage innovational challenges and how can innovative performance be measured? As ALTHEIDE (1996: 26) put it: “We want to ask the rights questions’that is, those that are conceptually cogent”. This chapter helps to find the ‘right’ questions and thus provides guidance through the process of data collection (see EISENHARDT 1989: 536; YIN 2003a: 3).

The previous chapter discussed the challenges of innovations in network industries from a general perspective. This chapter leaves the realm of theory and ventures into the empirical world of a specific case: the introduction of mobile Internet services. It applies the theoretical concepts as discussed before and addresses two questions: with what specific innovational challenges was the introduction of the mobile Internet confronted? An understanding of the nature of the innovational challenges further allows us to predict what kinds of team behaviours are appropriate for overcoming the given problems. The question which arises can be expected to generate a better fit will therefore be answered in the latter part of this chapter.

The first section of this chapter reports the results of the empirical inquiry concerning the differences in the organisation of technical development and market creation in Europe and Japan. The empirical work has been directed by the refined analytical framework developed in the previous chapter (see 3.3) and focused on the structural success factors such as the number of members or the degree of intra-team competition that had been indicated as relevant to performance by theoretical reflections (see Table 2). With regard to differences in the approaches towards market creation, special attention was devoted to differences in the business models of the network operators (see 3.3.2).

Chapter 3 indicated that organisational problems were at the heart of innovational challenges that arose in the process of developing mobile Internet services. The previous analysis of the innovator teams in Chapter 4 led to the hypothesis that European and Japanese teams embodied different structural strengths and weaknesses, which could be expected to influence the teams' capabilities to solve these organisational issues (i.e. the fit between team behaviour and innovational challenges). European teams, in particular, could be expected to face higher frictions while specifying interfaces than their Japanese counterparts. In order to achieve the same level of interface quality, European players were required to compensate for the frictions with greater efforts in testing activities.

Chapter 3 showed that organisational problems were at the heart of the innovational challenges. Based upon this observation, it was hypothesized that differences in the organisational structure of the teams determined the capability of a given team to achieve a good fit between innovational challenge and its behaviour, i.e. its approaches toward the innovational problems.

It is a well-known fact#x2014;at least to those interested in mobile communications—that Japanese and European firms had approached the innovational challenges of the mobile Internet with different strategies. Japanese mobile operators developed platforms that enabled mobile Internet services in exclusive alliances with selected suppliers, creating proprietary technologies. Non—Japanese firms, in contrast, pursued an open and standardised approach, establishing the WAP Forum that later enlisted almost all the global players in the mobile telecommunications and IT industry. It is also no secret that in terms of market acceptance mobile Internet services became a tremendously successful innovation in Japan, whereas the mobile Internet failed to attract consumers in Europe. Previous research, consequently, focused attention on the characteristics of the Japanese approaches, achieving a fairly comprehensive description of the Japanese methods.