Complexity and interconnection of business environments are often difficult to study by existing and well diffused strategic management tools. To fill this gap, we suggest a model that maps the industry dynamics. Taking into account actors, their positions and their relations with a broad scope and a long time horizon, we show through the suggested model a dual view about how the industry currently works and how it can be transformed in the future. The application of this model to the case study reveals some interesting insights and allows the discussion about the potentialities of the proposed framework.

Wireless communities have been long considered an interesting approach to provide mobile Internet, but the key issue is whether they are able to attract and retain a critical mass of active members. It is therefore crucial to understand what motivates and dissuades people from joining and participating in them, especially with the development of mainstream 3G technologies, in order to evaluate their potential development. This paper analyzes motivations and barriers influencing participation in a large wireless community – Fon – based on a survey of 268 members. Two distinct forms of participation driven by different motivations emerge: a ‘participation by sharing’ driven by idealistic motivation and a ‘social participation’ driven by social motives and technical interest. Utilitarian motivations do not play a major role for active participation despite being crucial in attracting members to the community. Accordingly, the way hybrid wireless communities are currently designed (hardly offering occasions for a social usage experience, experimentation and with decreasing utilitarian benefits due the development of 3G technologies) is casting serious doubts about a possible potential development above the status of a niche complement to the dominant cellular technologies.

Wireless communities are an interesting alternative to 3G networks to provide mobile Internet access. However, the key success factor for their sustainability is whether they are able to attract and retain a critical mass of contributing members. It is thus important to understand what motivates and dissuades people to join and participate. This chapter analyzes motivations, concerns, usage, and satisfaction of members of Fon. Fon is the largest wireless community in the world. This study employs a mixed research method, combining qualitative exploratory interviews with a quantitative survey. Members are mainly motivated by a mix of utilitarian (getting free connectivity) and idealistic motivations (reciprocity and altruism), whereas intrinsic and social motivations are less relevant.

The development of wireless communities has accelerated with the emergence of firms that incorporate this concept into a commercial business model. This hybrid community approach, where a company supports a community of individuals sharing their access points with each other, shows great promise to reach a global status as shown by the example of FON and the millions of members it has attracted. The key success factor for a community is attaining a critical mass of active members and it is thus vital to understand their motivations and develop suitable incentives to foster their participation. Because existing research is mostly limited to pure communities, this paper intends to study motivations of members in a hybrid community. To explore and understand them, it employs a qualitative approach based on 30 interviews with FON members in Switzerland. Tangible rewards appear to be the biggest motivation: the possibility to get free Internet access from other members is seen as the strongest incentive. Other utilitarian aspects like getting economical hardware or revenue sharing were also mentioned at times. A second strong motivation that emerges is the appeal of the concept of sharing, though members see it with various nuances like a reciprocal exchange, a purely altruistic act, or a way to better use existing infrastructure. Other less frequently cited motivations were idealistic (to promote free Internet or support alternatives to commercial operators) or related to technical interest and curiosity (to see how it works and experiment). On the other hand, social and intrinsic motivations are weak: members do not really feel part of a community as cooperative aspects are restricted to sharing resources and social interaction is limited. Finally, members are generally aware of potential risks such as security, abuse and legality, but they are not really concerned by them as the presence of a firm supporting the community plays a major role in reassuring members.

One of the major recent trends in the IT landscape is the fast emergence of community-based models centered on the active participation of users as contributors. This trend is so strong that many observers consider it as a step in the evolution of systems, for instance by referring to it as Web 2.0. Community-based models permeated various types of services like social networks, user generated content communities, interest or practice communities, peer-to-peer networks, open source software communities, wireless communities and so on. However, using a community-based model is not a guarantee of success, as the primary key success factor is the ability to attract a critical mass of contributing users. Therefore, a key research issue is to understand what motivates users to actively participate in such virtual communities typically characterized by a loose group of individuals that primarily interact via some computer-mediated communication media. This paper proposes a review of existing studies of user motivation in various types of virtual communities with the goal of highlighting a few general motivations that are recurring across the various community types as well as suggesting that motivations are context sensitive by pointing out that the importance of the various types of motivation is somewhat different across the different types of communities. The results of this paper are a taxonomy of communities in four broad types according to their primary orientation (social relationships, contents, interests and resources), a taxonomy of motivations (intrinsic, psychological, social and economical) and a mapping between the various community types and motivations.

Environment information systems that supply managers with timely and actionable information about the environment of their firm, so that they can make suitable strategic decisions, are increasingly critical because of the rising turbulence, complexity and disruptiveness of business environments. Regrettably, existing research lacks a conceptual framework that can be used to support the design and development of such system. This article tries to fill this gap by proposing a framework defining a set of concepts that such systems should cover, integrating them in a formal conceptual model and identifying some tools that can be used to analyse various parts of the model.

The emergence of wireless communities offers an attractive alternative to operator-centric models for providing broadband wireless services. While the first attempts of purely self-organized communities have been limited by the difficulty of attracting enough members willing to share their resources with the community, newer hybrid wireless communities (where a firm supports and incentivizes individuals who share their infrastructure in exchange of being able to exploit the network) is developing rapidly. This difference suggests the importance of attracting and motivating members with suitable incentives. While this is widely recognized as a key issue, existing research is limited to pure communities and does not adequately cover hybrid communities. Our research project intends to address this shortcoming by focusing on hybrid communities, building an adapted theoretical model considering specific motivations and collecting empirical evidence using mixed qualitative and quantitative methods like content analysis, interviews and a large-scale survey. As this is a research-in-progress, only the first results of the project are shown, namely an adapted theoretical model and some evidence from a content analysis of hybrid wireless community forums. Participation appears to be motivated by tangible rewards (free network access, revenue sharing), social rewards (socializing with peers and feel part of a community), psychological rewards (pursuing idealistic goals and feeling competent) and intrinsic enjoyment, but hindered by participation efforts (monetary costs and required effort) and other concerns (security, legality and bandwidth use).

The field of enterprise modelling has recently been very active and produced ontologies covering the various aspects of a business, gradually evolving f rom operational to strategic aspects. Following thi s evolution, the next logical step is to extend this field to cover the external environment of a firm. This is essential because firms need to attain a co-alig nment with their environment to survive and prosper and the rising turbulence of business environments can limit the ability of firms to attain their goals. In these situations, managers cannot longer rely on intuition and experience alone, but they need a conceptual model of the environment that helps them to model and reason about their environment so as to craft strategies that are better aligned with it. This paper follows an ontological approach to create an environment ontology based on a thorough literature review of twenty renowned journals in management. The resulting ontology identifies four environment domains of strategic importance to a firm (markets, value propositions, actors and issue s) together with a set of concepts to describe and reason about these domains. The ontology is applied to a real environment through a longitudinal case study on the Swiss WISP industry and is valida ted by interviews with the industry participants as well as by comparing the insights obtained by using it with the actual evolution of the industry.

This paper addresses the topic of the assessment of an organization's external environment and more particularly the lack of research providing conceptual foundations for developing suitable strategic information systems supplying managers with the necessary information and analysis tools to consider the key environmental aspects that are relevant to strategic decision making. Inspired by research in the field of domain and enterprise ontologies, this paper argues that the development of a formal model of the environment would help solve this problem. As a result, this paper develops a conceptual model of the environment that assembles the available but scattered knowledge on this topic and translates it into a more formal form that may facilitate the creation of environmental

The emerging use of WLAN technologies to provide WISP services in public locations has been a hot topic in the mobile industry as it threatened traditional mobile operator business models and their revenues. In contrast, some observers argued that this was simply an unjustified hype as WLAN would play a minor role or be integrated by mobile operators in their offerings. This paper studies the evolution of the WISP industry in Switzerland with two case studies. The first conducted in 2002 at the emergence of the industry to show how the hype surrounding WLAN resulted in the creation of a new industry attracting firms with various business models. The second conducted in 2006 after a period of consolidation to see how the industry evolved and whether the initial hype actually materialized.

1 6 STRUCTURE OF THIS THESIS -Chapter I presents the motivations of this dissertation by illustrating two gaps in the current body of knowledge that are worth filling, describes the research problem addressed by this thesis and presents the research methodology used to achieve this goal. -Chapter 2 shows a review of the existing literature showing that environment analysis is a vital strategic task, that it shall be supported by adapted information systems, and that there is thus a need for developing a conceptual model of the environment that provides a reference framework for better integrating the various existing methods and a more formal definition of the various aspect to support the development of suitable tools. -Chapter 3 proposes a conceptual model that specifies the various enviromnental aspects that are relevant for strategic decision making, how they relate to each other, and ,defines them in a more formal way that is more suited for information systems development. -Chapter 4 is dedicated to the evaluation of the proposed model on the basis of its application to a concrete environment to evaluate its suitability to describe the current conditions and potential evolution of a real environment and get an idea of its usefulness. -Chapter 5 goes a step further by assembling a toolbox describing a set of methods that can be used to analyze the various environmental aspects put forward by the model and by providing more detailed specifications for a number of them to show how our model can be used to facilitate their implementation as software tools. -Chapter 6 describes a prototype of a strategic decision support tool that allow the analysis of some of the aspects of the environment that are not well supported by existing tools and namely to analyze the relationship between multiple actors and issues. The usefulness of this prototype is evaluated on the basis of its application to a concrete environment. -Chapter 7 finally concludes this thesis by making a summary of its various contributions and by proposing further interesting research directions.

Appraising the environmental context in which an organization deploys its activity is a necessity in order to make appropriate decisions and adapting strategies to a context in constant evolution, especially in a time where this context is increasingly complex, uncertain and disruptive. Decision makers therefore need more than ever better tools that aid them to analyze their environment, providing them the most pertinent information to take the most appropriate decisions. In this paper, we attempt to propose a set of reusable artifacts that would facilitate the development of decision support systems for assessing the organization's environment. In particular, we propose an ontology that defines the different elements that shall be taken into account in order to effectively and efficiently scan an environment. We then provide an overview of some analysis techniques and tools that could be useful to analyze, assess and visualize essential information about these elements. Finally, we present two decision support system prototypes that allow a partial analysis of the environment using appropriate interaction and visualization techniques.

Mobile payment is a very promising service, which is still in an early stage of development. Various solutions have been proposed with disparate success. This can partially be explained by the immaturity of the market, by the inexistence of proven business models for the various actors, and by the presence of several unresolved technological and business issues. As these aspects are all relevant and interrelated, the purpose of this paper is to discuss the importance of analyzing the mobile payment environment using multiple perspectives. We therefore present an original approach based on a technology environment assessment framework, which combines the appraisal of different perspectives: namely the market, the actors and the issues that characterize the environment.

In large-scale negotiation problems and in assessments of complex and uncertain environments, it is vital to analyze the different stakeholders involved and to evaluate their positions in the negotiations. This paper extends a model, which merges previous multi-issue and actor-focused methods, based on power relationships between stakeholders and their ability to bargain in order to increase their utility. The model has already used for assessing a public WLAN landscape. The paper emphasizes the dynamic application of the model we developed for experimenting the negotiation evolution, shifting positions on some issues, and exchanging positions between actors. We also claim that such forecasting analyses of negotiation landscapes can be significantly improved using more appropriate visualization support. We propose new visualization tools for analyzing negotiation outcomes, representing negotiation landscapes, and applying what-if simulations, using passive influence, expected outcome and dissatisfaction, power distribution, proximity, and negotiation maps.

Over the years the environment of many enterprises has become progressively more unpredictable and complex. In particular, the increasingly rapid development of technology with its dramatic impacts on the market significantly contributes to enhance environmental unpredictability. The enterprise needs therefore some tools which help them to monitor their environment and keep track of the market and technology evolution. Technology roadmaps present suitable characteristics for guiding the environment scanning and intelligence efforts of the enterprise, by simultaneously showing the possible evolution of technology, products and markets and explicitly considering their linkages. However, the standard implementation of technology roadmaps overlooks an essential factor which is often determinant in shaping the environmental conditions and evolution: the actors inside the system can indeed influence their environment, at least to a certain extent, through their action. Consequently, we propose to extend the standard technology roadmaps by include an actors layer which bridges the technology and product perspectives.

Mobile customer relationship management (CRM) services seem to have all the characteristics commonly associated with successful mobile services and have accordingly been predicted to be among the most promising. However, real development of this sector has not been well explored so far, especially in relation to the actual supply of mobile CRM services to the public. The purpose of this paper is to reduce this gap by giving a first snapshot of the current development of the supply of mobile CRM services to consumers taken in the context of the Italian market. In order to do so, it firstly proposes a conceptual framework indicating the relevant aspects to investigate for assessing this kind of environments: the market, value propositions, actors and issues. Then it applies this framework to get an overview of the supply of mobile CRM services in Italy and provides some empirical insight about its current development obtained through an exhaustive survey of the current supply of 750 services from 353 firms.