How New Network Markets Emerge: A Comparative Analysis of the Mobile Internet in Japan and Europe

Although markets for network goods and services such as video games, DVD-players, or PC hard and software have since long become a standard topic of economic research and textbooks, our understanding of their emergence is less well advanced. The extent literature is particularly ´blind´ with regard to cases in which the compelling content that eventually drives demand for innovative hardware is not yet known. In such cases not the availability of a large content variety as such but the discovery of the ´right´ content is crucial for the emergence of a new market. This paper shows that firms which plan to launch a new network product but do not yet know how compelling content for this product will look like are well advised to ensure that a) experimentation processes inevitable for making latent customer needs explicit are not hampered and b) results of the experiments can be monitored, e.g. a billing infrastructure is in place that allows to individually track which content offering is demanded by customers and which is not