How the Ubiquity of Mobile Phones Is Unleashing an Entrepreneurial Revolution

Form, Transform, Platform

How the Ubiquity of Mobile Phones Is Unleashing an Entrepreneurial Revolution

Summarized by: Gaurav Yadav (P37018), Gaurav Mohta (P37019), Himani Sabharwal (P37024)

Today, when information technology has become more ubiquitous with business, its effect on social entrepreneurs was all but inevitable. The democratization of technology is empowering more people with information and creating value like never before. The mobile revolution, as illustrated in the article “Form, Transform, Platform: How the Ubiquity of Mobile Phones Is Unleashing an Entrepreneurial Revolution” (Iqbal Qadir, MIT Innovations, 2013), has only taken this idea even further. Moving beyond traditional systems of offline service delivery into a new phase of its integration with mobile tech is posed to transform every sector out there, from retail to healthcare.

While being a part of massive social change until recently could only be considered by people with deep pockets and big ideas, today, just with the handheld wonder a mobile is, everyone can contribute to social innovation and the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Despite differences in geography and focus areas, experiences with enabling clients in low-resource settings to adopt technology have been found to be strikingly similar and have yielded several lessons for other enterprises looking to deploy technology-based solutions to global development challenges.

The spread of mobile technology throughout low-income countries has nurtured prominent entrepreneurs, harnessing innate cost-efficiency, time saving and productivity improvement dimensions of mobile phones, coupled with their affordability to spark a social innovation revolution. Each new generally acknowledged innovation has hence been conceptualized as spreading across three periods of association between the innovation and the economy with an acknowledgement of the fact that the relative significance of these stages may change for any given innovation. Each of these stages offer ascend to a class of business visionaries, the three stages being:

1.  Form- the usage, hence improvement of another base of acquiring power emerging from expanded client profitability;
2. Transfer- the better approaches for doing business that further benefit from the innovation's potential outcomes; and
3. Platform- the new applications based on the first root innovation.

Mobile technology and entrepreneurs are hence envisioned as co-evolving realms- each one pushing the other to stretch its scope. At the point when another innovation touches base on the scene and individuals grasp it to progress their monetary lives, one life at a period enhances at a micro level. At a larger scale, when billions of such progressions include, they offer ascent to significant new markets open to entrepreneurial investigation, thereby triggering innovation across the domain of social entrepreneurship.