Dynamic Capability Analysis Of Ghanaian Mobile Business Organisations

ABSTRACT Individual and business consumers are increasingly adopting mobile devices and mobile services. Technology research in taking its usual cow paths has predominantly focused on the consumer adoption of mobile phones and mobile services. There is a somewhat silence in research on how firms in the mobile technology ecosystem develop these mobile services for consumption or adoption by individuals and businesses. This silence is more severe for mobile business organisations (MBOs), which act as third-party mobile value-added service (MVAS) providers/creators, as compared to mobile network operators. This study attempts to address this imbalance. The study seeks to investigate how mobile business organisations develop capabilities to provide mobile services (content and applications) for adoption by individual and business consumers. Specifically, it engages a critical realism approach to examine the type of m-business capabilities Ghanaian MBOs possess, how they use these capabilities to create m-services for consumer and business adoption/consumption. A prevailing theoretical approach for understanding how firms create capabilities from their resources is the dynamic capability (DC) framework, which measures a firm’s propensity to continue changing its resource base in response to its competitive environment. Based on the DC framework, this study contributes a theoretically-based and empirically tested research model to explain the how MBOs deploy and manage resources to create capabilities, going beyond the generic frameworks that may not apply to the specific context of m-business. This study also identifies a set of m-business capabilities that MBOs can draw on to become market leaders or stay in competition. In addition, this study lends support to measuring the impact of firms’ dynamic capabilities as either market-based impact or financial impact. This helps to some extent to overcome the ambiguities of measuring overall firm performance and/or competitive advantage.