A social networking approach for mobile innovation in emerging countries

Abstract

Addressing the global challenges and the next billion mobile subscribers, the MIT NextLab course engages students, industry partners, entrepreneurs and the next billion mobile subscribers to develop innovative mobile services that improve the quality of life in the emerging countries. In three years, NextLab teams developed and deployed 29 projects in 14 counties, and five teams founded their own ventures after perceiving the strong demand from the vast mobile users in the developing world. However, the size and the amount of NextLab projects are limited by the schedule and the location of an academic course. The focus of this thesis is to research and develop a social networking platform that replicates the success of the NextLab course to reach out to more participants around the world. In this document, I utilized the social analysis framework to identify social processes among stakeholders in a general NextLab project, specify the possible social failures and research the possible solutions. Besides, I also reviewed the NextLab projects in 2008 and 2009 and developed the NextLab Project Development Process (NLPDP) that highlights the 12 critical stages of a NextLab project. Finally, I proposed the NextLab 2.0 Community that is integrates with the social networking solutions and the NextLab Project Development Process. The case study of the mobile logistics (m-Logistics) project is used to demonstrate how the proposed solution facilitates the collaboration and communication for a large and cross-country mobile innovation project. A number of recommendations were also discussed for further research.