Tags: Mobile business, scenarios, scenario planning, technology foresight

A number of scenario planning studies have been conducted in relation to mobile business in the recent years for analyzing major trends and challenges in the wireless domain. Unfortunately, most of them ignore the other ones and never try to compare their results with the others. Now this validation phase is an important phase in a design science process. Without any kind of validation, the scenario approach will always have difficulties to be accepted as a pertinent method. This article is a first step towards this validation phase. It synthesizes and compares a representative set of these scenario proposals in order to extract the scenarios which are accepted as likely by most authors as well as a set of less frequent, but not less interesting, scenarios so as to provide some insight about the potential futures for the mobile business industry. For crosschecking the proposed scenarios, we adopted three different frameworks for classifying and examining the possible futures from many perspectives such as the role of the stakeholders, mainly the operators and the public authorities, the competition and collaboration in m-business, and several other technological, social, and political issues.

A Comparative Analysis of Published Scenarios for M-Business.doc