Evolution of mobile ecosystem for the Internet of things

The Internet of things (IoT) offers the mobile ecosystem new growth opportunities. In particular, the main ecosystem stakeholders, mobile network operators (MNOs) and mobile platform providers (MPPs; e.g., Apple and Google), can grow their customer base and product portfolio. To realize these opportunities, stakeholders must evolve their current technologies and services to suit the requirements of new IoT devices and customer groups. Such developments may cause considerable and uncertain changes to the mobile ecosystem. Ecosystem stakeholders must understand and prepare for such changes to ensure future growth. This thesis investigates the evolution of the mobile ecosystem for IoT. To gain a more comprehensive understanding, the thesis considers ecosystem changes relevant from the perspective of two key stakeholders – MNOs and MPPs. First, the main changes from the viewpoint of MNOs are analyzed. Namely, the use of mobile IoT across industries is explored to understand the new customer types of MNOs. Then, changes that Embedded SIM (eSIM), a potentially disruptive IoT technology for remote SIM management, may cause to the ecosystem are scrutinized. Further, the main ecosystem changes from the viewpoint of MPPs are examined. First, the thesis considers a new sub-ecosystem emerging around platforms for sharing data in the consumer IoT domain. Specifically, the governance of collaboration and competition in such sub-ecosystems is studied on the example of mobile health field. Next, given the interest of large MPPs in mobile health, the thesis analyzes the feasibility of MPPs expanding their services to the highly regulated healthcare industry. Several diverse methods are adopted in the research. For example, exploratory data analysis is utilized to examine the use of mobile IoT, and value network analysis is used to investigate structural ecosystem changes due to eSIM. Data is drawn from diverse sources, including interviews, web sources, patents, press releases, and traffic measurements in a mobile network. In terms of the manifold results, a few are highlighted. The analysis demonstrates that mobile IoT traffic patterns significantly differ from handsets and across industries. Further, the study shows that the extent of ecosystem changes brought by eSIM could range from insignificant to disruptive depending on the value network of the eSIM service and its diffusion. In particular, if eSIM is also used in smartphones and dynamic multihoming is broadly adopted, competition and service provisioning will fundamentally transform. Furthermore, the analysis determines the key design and governance decisions that MPPs can use as mechanisms for managing coopetition with new complementors in mobile health platforms. Finally, the study shows that MPPs can act as health data aggregators that connect unregulated consumer and regulated medical domains of the healthcare ecosystem thereby taking a central ecosystem position.