Mobile Service Delivery Business Models in Europe and Japan: The shift from "wherever and whenever" to "right here and now"

We apply a utilitarian concept of business models to strategy and service innovation in Japanese and European mobile services with a focus on value network integration. Mobile service delivery remains a quandary to be solved in the mobile Internet system: infrastructure and handset products have both entered mass production, dominant designs prevail, and open APIs for third parties are provided. Massive resources are currently being invested in both the mobile and PC industry to achieve new mobile service delivery innovations on the assumption that solutions will result in a higher net output and load factor of the mobile Internet system as a whole. Initial industry consensus goals around 1999 focused on base service technology enabling device support and always-on features. The technical priorities of carriers and key content providers have since then gradually changed to support a spatial and temporal shift among user preferences: A migration from \´whenever and wherever\´ to \´here and now". The analysis is supported with cases in music and commerce from the leading mobile market: Japan. We conclude with a discussion of how the Japanese service value network has enabled mobile commerce transactions that exceeded Euro 2.8 billion in 2005.