Informational challenges-absence, uncertainty, asymmetry-shape the working of markets and commerce in many developing countries. For developing country micro-enterprises, which form the bulk of all enterprises worldwide, these challenges shape the characteristics of their supply chains. They reduce the chances that business and trade will emerge. They keep supply chains localised and intermediated. They make trade within those supply chains slow, costly, and risky.Mobile telephony may provide an opportunity to address the informational challenges and, hence, to alter the characteristics of trade within micro-enterprise supply chains. However, mobile telephony has only recently penetrated. This paper, therefore, presents one of the first case studies of the impact of mobile telephony on the numerically-dominant form of enterprise, based around a case study of the cloth-weaving sector in Nigeria.It finds that there are ways in which costs and risks are being reduced and time is saved, often by substitution of journeys. But it also finds a continuing need for journeys and physical meetings due to issues of trust, design intensity, physical inspection and exchange, and interaction complexity. As a result, there are few signs of the de-localisation or disintermediation predicted by some commentators. An economising effect of mobile phones on supply chain processes may therefore co-exist with the entrenchment of supply chain structures and a growing "competitive divide" between those with and without access to telephony. (c) 2008 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

No abstract

No abstract

The liberalisation of the telecommunications sector has undoubtedly contributed to the spread and adoption of mobile telephony across Africa but evidence also points to the fact that coverage gaps persist in some locations-mainly rural and remote areas-which are either unserved or underserved. In order to address this problem, governments across Africa have established universal service funds (USF) as their universal service strategy. Nonetheless, various studies have suggested that the problem of limited coverage remains unaddressed due, in part, to the poor implementation of USF. This raises the question as to why USF have failed to address the limited coverage of telecommunication services in Africa? We seek to answer this question by investigating the interplay between market liberalisation and universal service using a multiple case study approach with examples drawn from across the continent. We find that poor policy formulation limits the implementation of an effective USF model in Africa. In addition, inadequate stakeholder engagement, lack of accountability, inaccurate data, undue political influence and the narrow scope of universal service all impinge on the ability of USF to achieve their objectives. We, therefore, propose the need for future research to address these challenges and develop our framework to unravel some of the intractable areas of universal service such as determining what services should fall within the scope of universal service and how to prevent policy redundancy in a fast moving industry such as mobile telecommunications.

With the rapid development of computing and telecommunications infrastructure, a new electronic space has emerged which coexists, and sometimes intertwines, with the physical space and place of our world. This has greatly increased the complexity and flexibility of the new space economy for organisations and individuals, and increasingly we have to live in`two spaces'. Since the late 1980s researchers have successfully dismissed the misconception about the`death of distance' in the information economy. However, the dissemination of this progress has been slow and fragmented. Utopian views about the`end of geography' remain very influential in current business thinking and in research on information systems and organisational innovations. Numerous failed business applications of information systems have resulted from a lack of geographical considerations. This situation has been significantly exacerbated in the last few years by the rapid developments of the Internet and new applications based on it, such as e-commerce and e-business. Researchers have a duty not only to understand the new geography of the information economy, but also to inform the public about the key features of the`two spaces' that all organisations and individuals have to live in. In this paper, some case studies and emerging business phenomena are used to illustrate the importance of introducing a geographical dimension into research on information systems and organisational innovations. Several new themes for further research are also highlighted.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract