With the flagship success of m-Pesa, financial services via mobile devices have become an important tool to facilitate the financial inclusion of the previously unbanked population in developing countries. Attempts to provide a landscape of academic research findings at the intersection of mobile financial services, financial inclusion, and development have been rather scant. To determine the key issues and gaps in the current academic research, this study conducts a systematic review of 54 academic research papers vis-à-vis the nexus of mobile financial services, financial inclusion, and development. The results show that the extant literature addresses three major clusters of topics: delivery, environmental factors, and the impact of mobile financial services. Still in the nascent stage of research, the topics covered in the literature indicate a bias towards institutional and individual preconditions for the implementation of mobile financial services, rather than actual supply and demand by users, and its impact on society. The choice of research methods also shows limited variety and depth. This study contributes towards understanding the existing research on mobile financial services for financial inclusion in developing countries and finding research gaps for future study.

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This paper presents a new approach to assess the e-Government maturity with an aim to facilitate public sector innovation in developing countries. NIAT takes a rare approach to comprehensively assess the needs and capabilities by a participatory measure. It provides a standardized assessment process in order to ensure the quality of data. NIAT contributes to the service innovation by providing improved contents for e-Government services and identifying priorities of ICT strategy. It also stimulates organizational innovation in the public sector by building capacity of stakeholders across governmental silos and sectors. NIAT is a toolkit for quick deployment of ICT strategy and action plan grounded on actual experiences of e-Government developments in Korea. By offering a proven, pre-costed pool of projects readily applicable in practice, NIAT allows an accelerated prioritization of the relevant projects. In addition, the participatory process involving key actors in the government is a consensus building mechanism to generate political buy-ins for the project chosen.

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As the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between China and Korea is completed, and one among China, Japan and Korea (CJK) is being discussed, a renewed attention is given to the three countries' efforts to establish a Northeast Asian regional standards cooperation mechanism. In this paper, two ICT-oriented standards cooperative programs among the three countries, CJK-SITE and CJK-ITSM, are selected as a research setting and examined. The analysis indicates that the slow progress of CJK ICT standards cooperation can be explained by two conflicting perspectives: techno-regionalism and techno-nationalism. From the techno-regionalism perspective, standards cooperation will position CJK at a more strategic standing to effectively respond to the ever-intensifying global standards wars over the international ICT market. However, there exist significant gaps among the three countries as to why and how to purse the standards cooperation. The authors attribute the gaps to techno-nationalism which dominates the agenda of each country's national standardization policy. Despite the apparent rationales for regional cooperation, as a Chinese proverb says, it seems that the three countries go to ‘the same bed with different dreams.'

This research is aimed at developing a document content analysis method to be applied in studies of standardization and technology development. The proposed method integrates two theoretical frameworks: the co-evolutionary technology development framework and the “D-N-S” (Design, Negotiation, Sense-making) framework for anticipatory standardizing. At the backdrop of complex and diversified landscape of science and R&D efforts in the technology domain, and the repeated criticism of the weak link between R&D initiatives and standardization, it is argued that the method offered in this work helps to better understand the internal dynamics of the technology development process at the early stage of standardization or pre-standardization, which, in turn, can help mobilize and direct the R&D initiatives. To demonstrate the practical usefulness of the proposed method, this paper conducts a content analysis of the research contributions presented in the COST Action IC0905 “Techno-Economic Regulatory Framework for Radio Spectrum Access for Cognitive Radio/ Software Defined Radio” (COST-TERRA).