Developing countries take frog leaps in technological advance. For example, moving to 4G communications from scratch. This reveals tremendous opportunities as infrastructure for advanced service delivery is suddenly in place. As the technological advancement is so disruptive, a lot of prefacing needs to be carried out prior to an ecosystems' emergence. This article presents an experience report on ecosystem prefacing for emerging developing country markets. We provide an analysis of the Tanzanian working environment; noting aspects that are present for a developing country, unique to the distinct culture, and similar to industrial countries. We then apply an ecosystem prefacing process that actively nds challenges and solutions for a xed application context whilst acknowledging the previous aspects. For this experience report, we gather empirical data by executing the process in two-phase innovation workshop and stakeholder co-operation event where the xed application context consists from SmartCity concept based on a major ICT vendor.
Developing countries digitize at an unprecedented speed, skipping many
conventional technologies, and for example moving directly to 4G mobile
communications from scratch [
The digital communications service provider, the platform provider, and the
platform-based or independent end-user service producer are major links
identi able from the aforementioned digital service chain [
For many contexts, the last scenario is the only method for producing
solutions (e.g. digitalization of context-speci c business processes). Looking at the
most versatile way to take full advantage of the widespread digital
communications network, it is, arguably, much more e cient and thus lucrative to produce
solutions on top of platforms [
Another, arguably more important, aspect involving the digital platforms is
that they have a crucial role in facilitating the emergence of (software?) business
ecosystems [4, 5, c.f.]. As the platforms acts as an enabler, as per the previous
paragraph, the platforms have an ability of steering like minded developers
together in limiting the solution context and providing a common development
infrastructure for this limited area. These contexts are prime areas for
innovation emergence as joining members with initial ideas may take ques from the
platform provider, the more mature projects exploiting the platform, and the
more advanced developers working on technologies associated to the platform,
and by using this support the ecosystem provides, to upgrade their initial idea
into an innovative service or product [
A clear prerequisite for a platform-driven business ecosystem emergence is a welcoming environment: there are clearly distinguished needs|which t a context limited by the platform|and capability to address them. This capability is mainly concerned with sourcing developers that are capable of understanding and solving the needs, but reaches to for example political willingness of local governments to support introduction of the service solutions for use.
In the remainder of this article, we discuss our motivation for creating platform-driven business ecosystems for emerging markets in developing countries. Further, the aim of the article is to build an emergence prefacing process for these ecosystems, and to apply it in a case-study fashion. The objective hence translates into designing a practical way to probe how welcoming the environment is for new ecosystems. Section 2 describes our motivation, the foreseeable value added for both single solution developers and platform providers working in emerging markets while Section 3 goes over selected previous work on topics related to this. Section 4 introduces our ecosystem prefacing process, and the process is then applied in Section 5. A discussion, highlighting lessons learned and future endeavours, is provided as the last section, Section 6.
To motivate our work, we want to discuss the many potential bene ts coming from a digital business ecosystem in the context of developing countries and their emerging markets. We have captured the most notable bene ts in Figure 1. The gure presents a dualistic value creation proposal between the digital platform provider and the single solution developer discussed for the service re nement chain (c.f. Section 1), but the contents, the value creation proposals, are adjusted to highlight the special context of working in emerging markets for developing countries. Regarding nancial feasibility for the actors, the single solution developers will see the low-cost of market entry while the platform providers should nd access to context knowledge{in return for hosting and marketing services{lucrative. The aim of the later parts of the article is to build an ecosystem emergence prefacing process. This process intends to understand if the dualistic value creation is capable of creating and sustaining an ecosystem. But rst, let us go through the dualistic value proposals in more detail.
Starting with the leverage and scalable startups which are value proposals coming from the platform providers and are targeting the developing world problem solvers (i.e. single solution developers; more on this naming later). Leverage has two meanings here. First, platform providers have the ability of providing leverage by facilitating development. In developing countries, access to various technical equipment can be scarce. The platform provider generally has resources to organize joint development facilities or, at least, to organize hackathon or other similar-typed short events for initial solution development. The second meaning of leveraging here revolves around the platform providers being able to act as a support for advancing the platform-based solution for institutional adoption. Several developer struggle, especially in developing countries, to demonstrate adequate maintenance and sustenance levels which are required for example for municipal or nation wide use of particular solutions. This "sustenance-image" of the solution also aids in propping single user con dence and thus will to adopt the solution.
Scalable startups applies to all markets as a value proposition, not just emerging markets in developing countries. What this means is that for a mature platform there exists exemplar scenarios for how a startup maybe scaled together with increasing adoption of the service. In addition to this business advice and mentoring, the platform itself will be easily capable of addressing the increased demand for example for computation power and data bandwidth; if not, then the platform provider will advance the issue with for example digital communications providers to increase capacity of the network.
Moving to developing world problem solvers, we have renamed the single solution developers here to highlight that, in the context of emerging markets for developing countries, this group provides unique access to the challenges, solutions, and intrinsic context knowledge related to the market. Noting that all major platform providers are based in industrialized countries, the aforementioned perspective is extremely valuable for them. Thus, we note that the developing world problem solvers can make at least the value propositions about knowledge from developing countries business, market access, and replicable business. In practice the problem solvers will produce this information by proposing solutions on top of the platform.
Starting with knowledge from developing countries business, if the platform providers are successful in engaging single solution developers who genuinely represent the local context, the platform providers may expect two learn two things. First, the solutions introduced on top of the platform highlight the challenges relevant to that context. Second, the business data generated by the single solution developers working on these challenges will allow the platform providers to understand how business is conducted in these markets.
The market access value proposal follows from the previous. Firstly, the developed single solutions provide a route for the platform providers to access the market as a solution provider themselves. They may either opt to invest or to fully acquire upcoming solution businesses or they may use the business data gathered from them to adapt similar, already proven successful, solutions from other markets to this market. An example of the former being Google's acquisition of Quicko ce which is now a major part of Google Docs. Examples of the latter are obviously less reputable, but we may look for example at the design of the Weibo and QQ social media applications in China, and we may argue for how heavily they are in uenced by their western counterparts.
The business data gathered by the platform provider allows a further chance for market access to be exploited by way of sharing this data. The platform provider may act as a consultant for entering the emerging market, providing other businesses with valuable data about the context's challenges and solutions coupled with information about running the platform on top of the contextspeci c infrastructure.
Lastly, developing world problem solvers give a value proposal in the way of replicable business. Acting either alone or together with the original single solution developer, the platform provider may start to look for similar contexts, probe for the challenges existence in this context, and then advance the solutions adoption in this market.
Reviewing the aforestated value proposals, we see that there is, arguably, a rather direct dualism between the value proposed by and for both parties.
To provide an academic backdrop, we will visit selected related works on
ecosystems, their emergence, the role of innovations, ecosystems assessment, and some
foreseen general bene ts attainable from working ecosystems. Additionally we
will also discuss the developing countries component in relation to all previous;
highlighting the potential development impact from previous works.
Ecosystem Emergence Cusumano [
Adner and Kapoor [
Ecosystem Value Generation Chains Regarding value chains and their ability
to generate additional value in ecosystems, Coursaris et al. [
Ecosystem Sustenance Regarding the platforms and their providers, several
additional factors have been observed in the literature; adding to or redacting from
the value generation chain. Allon et al. [
Another notable role is observed by van Angeren et al. [
Developing Countries The setting for technological advancement is challenging
in developing countries. Vivarelli [
Finally, regarding ecosystems in the context of developing countries,
Tanskanen et al. [
Our three-stage ecosystem prefacing process is captured in Figure 2. The three
stages consist from xing the platform provider, nding innovations and solutions
in a context that is sensitive to the platform and the working environment, and
nally distilling challenges to use as a tool to assess feasibility for an ecosystem
emergence. This process takes from the emerging market strategies presented in
for example [
Our ecosystem prefacing process is started with the select platform stage
(c.f. Fig. 2). With this stage, we argue that to initialize the ecosystem prefacing,
we need to be able to x the platform provider prior to any further
ecosystemsupporting-actions are taken in the emerging market. Demanding the existence
of a platform provider at this early stage relates to the various supporting
functions we have described for the platform provider to have on to the single solution
developer (c.f. Section 2). If we are unable to establish that this crucial support
exists for the single solution developers we may not assume that the solution
context used for nding solutions is actually actionable [
The other reason for xing the solution provider at this early stage is to
make sure that the digital communications infrastructure is actually in place
( rst part of the service re nement chain discussed in Section 1) and that it is
able to accommodate the platform and thus the solutions which will be developed
on top of it. Again, this adds to ensuring that the solution context will be an
actionable one. [
Lastly, xing the platform provider will also contribute to limiting the
solution context o ered for innovation and solution nding in the next stage.
Limitation is important from the point-of-view of which developing world problem
solvers (i.e. single solution developers, c.f. Figure 1) will be engaged [
The nd innovations and solutions is the second stage of the ecosystem
prefacing processes. This stage works directly on the limited, actionable solution
context coming from the previous, select platform, stage. It is the
responsibility of this stage to take the solution context and present it for the developing
world problem solvers, those stakeholders who represent the emerging market
end-users, their needs and culture of working towards meeting those needs [
Facilitated innovation events (e.g., hackathons) are commonly used activities
to advance this stage [
Finally, the last, assess feasibility, stage is used to understand how feasible it is to act on the solution concepts; how feasible it is to use this platform's solution context to discover needs and to produce solutions for them. Rather than using this stage to assess feasibility of individual solution concepts, the feasibility assessment is directed towards meeting the challenges that currently bar implementation of the individual, re ned concepts. This is the reason why the previous stage is ended with a concept-implementation-challenge-identi cation analysis.
The facilitated events is the activity of choice for executing the last stage
of the ecosystem prefacing process. Here, the platform provider can act as the
facilitating party together with for example academic bodies that may convey a
neutral analysis about the feasibility of the emerging market and the
possibilities related to establishing the platform in this developing-country-context. The
selection of invitees should be based on the identi ed challenges. Mainly this will
include public sector actors and possibly some private sector ones as well. The
main outcome of this stage should be an assessment of feasibility regarding if
the identi ed challenges can be overcome. [
We executed the ecosystem prefacing process described in Section 4 for a major ICT vendor's SmartCity platform. This limited the solution context to have a geospatial data element. In this case, the process was executed in the Tanzanian developing country setting wherein close history indicated that a market for the described context could likely emerge. The staged execution will be described in more detail below while limitations and reliability issues are discussed in Section 6.
In the rst stage, the particular vendor was chosen as the platform provider due to a number of reasons. The vendor has been very active in developing advanced service delivery platforms especially for developing countries. Arguably, the vendor has an advantage in this as it is also heavily involved in delivery of 3/4/5G communications infrastructure for these countries. Due to the vendor's own interest and heavy dedication to establishing itself in the developing countries, no heavy prework was needed from our end, the academic actors advancing the prefacing process. Merely, we needed to ensure that the vendor would be available for the varying, upcoming activities.
The chosen solution context was the major ICT vendor's SmartCity platform. This is an advanced, multi-layered service delivery technology suite with the intention of connecting most, if not all, municipal infrastructure in an IoT (Internet of Things) fashion. There is clearly a hardware component to this, involving upgrading and/or renewing existing infrastructure. Most of this is handled by the platform provider together with local actors. On top of this, the vendor's SmartCity o ers a suite of multi-layered access and control methods which can be exploited by way of making developed single solutions use the offered interfaces. The vendor's pro-active approach to introducing the platform to cities ensures that the SmartCity provides and actionable context. The physical presence of connected hardware and the ability to convey location based information in the platform limits the solution context to having a geospatial component.
The second stage was to introduce this solution context to able and interest bodies representing the local context. We used the facilitated hackathon as the activity to advance this and organized the Geospatial SmartCity Innovation Workshop. To nd relevant stakeholders, single solution developers, developing world problem solvers, we used a network of higher education institutes. Noting the technological and geospatial contexts, we engaged young ICT and geospatial experts from the relevant departments from Geography and ICT departments of two Tanzanian universities, University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM) and Ardhi University (ARU), to recruit attendees.
The one day workshop was initiated with a couple of presentation describing what the emerging markets have to o er and how can the SmartCity platform be utilized in this. First round of innovation workshoping was facilitated as a problem discovery stage. Afterwards the teams presented circa 70 di erent needs that they had identi ed from their local context. The second round was used for re ning innovations, solutions for the needs. For this, the teams were presented with solution concept document which steered their thought process. The document had parts capturing the speci c problem and the solution, tying a nancial service model to providing the solution, describing the relevant existing solutions and stakeholders from where re ned needs could be probed, and nally identifying if the previous parts highlighted challenges to advancing the solution creation. In the end this facilitation distilled the circa 70 problems in to 12 re ned concepts. The concepts included for example incident response, tra c routing, waste collection, and settlement growth management solutions.
We should also note from the previous workshop that, arguably, it was
important for the participants to have the ability to discuss in mixed groups, nd
peer support for their own ideas{leading to courage building, and to learn about
technologies that are applicable to solving problems relevant to them. [
After the workshop, us the facilitators analyzed the 12 re ned concepts. From these we were able to pinpoint six speci c challenge areas that were baring the advancement of the concepts: sparse internet connectivity in speci c areas, di culties in co-operating with the government, access to technology, access to funding, deviations in own or acquired skill, and{possibly due to previous points{ a general hesitance in perceiving the current overall readiness being rather far from being able to accommodate SmartCity solutions.
Finally, as the last stage the six identi ed challenge areas were used to assess the feasibility for the major ICT vendor's SmartCity platform based ecosystem to emerge. The facilitated event for this was the Nordic Week Event (Finland Day), which was jointly organised by the Embassy of Finland in Dar es Salaam, the vendor and University of Turku. Notable government and municipal actors, as well as funding bodies were invited. The facilitators of the event were the Finnish embassy, University of Turku and the technology vendor. The circa 40 attendees were representatives of various governmental bodies, private companies, NGO's and universities. After brie y describing the emerging market possibilities and introducing some of the technologies enabling SmartCity concept, we initialized the feasibility discussion by presenting the six challenge areas identi ed. The discussion was semi-formal and constructed as one that was motivated to overcoming the challenges in order to allow exploitation of the previously described emerging markets. At the end of the Finland day, the facilitators of the event were con dent that there was strong will to enable and empower the development and business creation based on innovations, and that the vision for doing this called for acting on the presented challenges.
As illustrated in Figure 2, there are three phases in the ecosystem prefacing process. For implementing each of the phases there are several possible approaches. In this case, for phase one, rather than having an actual platform, we chose to use a number of technologies from a single major vendor directing and constraining the solution space. In the second phase we focused on participatory need identi cation and innovation development, the main question being 'what would it take to turn the idea into a viable business?'. This phase revealed various challenges that were discussed in the third phase. The main ndings of this discussion were (i) citizens are invaluable in seeing and understanding the needs in the society, but they lack awareness of the technology and the possibilities of solving the problems, (ii) city and governmental authorities have a central role and duty in promoting innovation and problem solving, but the communication and contacting channels between citizens and authorities are dysfunctional, and (iii) citizens, even young university students, tend to assume that governmental bodies are needed as a leading stakeholder to introduce new solutions in the society. Especially this third nding suggests that the experimental and iterative innovation methods, such as lean startup, that have been widely and successfully used in more market driven economies, may not be fully e ective.
Based on our single experiment we can already say that the model provides a fast and cost-e cient way to probe the potential in and challenges for new ecosystems. It should be noted however that the presented approach is supported only by the empirical evidence of its rst implementation in Section 5. As such, both the theoretical and empirical foundations of the proposed approach are subject to limitations; some of which also a ect reliability of the described process results and interpretations. Notably, competing or complementary emerging market processes are not thoroughly discussed here. For this reason, it is possible that for example some context attributes are not properly noted; making the introduced processes less sensitive to them. Gathering of qualitative data from on-site should counteract this to a degree. Heavy dependence on qualitative data on the other hand raises another concern about construct and external validity. Data analysis was committed by the authoring researchers. This can have a heavy emphasis on the results being interpreted in the context of developed countries. This can a ect construct validity as later stages of the presented process are heavily steered by the output of earlier steps. External validity wise dependence on qualitative data immediately emphasizes that the data set is only representative of one group of students in Tanzania. As such, we conclude on limitations and reliability that the 3 phase approach should be repeated in other related settings and it can and should be varied based on educated decisions.
For the rst phase our choice supported evaluation of the innovation climate, addressing issues such as public perception of innovation based entrepreneurship, roles and dependencies of actors in the eld, as well as the general ability of these actors, such as university students to drive technological innovations to viable business solutions. For technological feasibility prefacing, the phases should be implemented di erently. For example, with a chosen more precise technology platform, aspects of technical as well as commercial viability of the innovations can be evaluated. This selection would also naturally serve evaluation of the chosen platform as an actual basis for an ecosystem, for instance that the platform fosters the creation of a variety of solutions for di erent needs. In most powerful case the innovations drive the further development of the platform via screening needs and further potential.
We see several avenues for future research on the topic. First, we want to repeat and vary the process as noted previously to reduce some of its limitations. Second, we want to try and x the process more directly to an intended output: the current process serves a general purpose tool for probing ecosystem emergence, but in order to remain feasible to execute the process should be xed to for example link a platform limited in a particular way to a concrete "feasibility" output. An example of this could be a cooperation agreement between a platform operator and public sector bodies. Third, we want to execute a more breadth background investigation in to other competing and/or supporting emergence and feasibility gauging processes. The intention is to build a suite of processes that would o er the best set of activities to commit taking into account the technological, societal, and environmental setting. As a concrete next step, we have already agreed with several higher education institutes in Tanzania that we will be re-executing a revised version of the process in late 2018.