An innovation success: but who gets the revenues? Opera software in Nigeria

Abstract

The case giving the base for this article is a very rich network case, i.e. it describes the importance and the function of direct connections for a business highly embedded into a business environment. All the important existing business relationships in the case are directly connected to other business relationships. What the company is doing with a counterpart in Finland influences what it can do in Nigeria or other parts of the world. This is due to the fact that products and technical solutions are highly interrelated – embedded into each other. These connections give two different types of possibilities or restrictions for involved companies. First, it results in a specific network structure in each moment, which in the short run makes room for certain networking processes to exploit the given structure at the same time it excludes others. Second, it also makes room for a certain number of networking processes trying to exploit changes in the specific structure. Together these two types of networking processes create some room for each of the involved companies to maneuver while simultaneously creating very distinct restrictions. One special restriction is that all relationships and the value creation they represent can not be transformed into money! The specific structure and how it affects the chance to make money points to an extremely important feature of all (?) networks. The division or distribution of monetary rewards is not directly related to value creation. There are two different processes taking place at the same time. One is the value creation and the other is the division of rewards. These processes are probably related, but in a much more complicated way than we usually have assumed in earlier research. It is an aspect of the networks that we have to give much more attention in future studies.