The IMP group (IMP = International marketing and purchasing) annually organizes a conference on business network research. The focus is on B2B marketing and how different actor interact when doing business. Major contributions has and are made by researchers from the Nordic countries. This is also the case for this years´ conference with many participants from Denmark, Finland and Sweden. From Sweden papers were presented by researchers from the universities in Lund, Linköping, Uppsala, Gävle , Mälardalen (Västerås) and KTH.
Tatjana Apanasevic and Jan Markendahl from Communications systems at KTH presented three research papers and two teaching cases. Jan has been co-authoring papers at some previous conferences but this was the first time beeing present. All the KTH paper contributions deal with techno-economic analysis of solutions and services with high level of interaction between the involved business actors.
1. Network Cooperation Between Mobile Operators – Why and How Competitors Cooperate. Jan Markendahl, Amirhossein Ghanbari and Bengt G. Mölleryd
2. Business Challenges for Internet of Things – Findings from e-Home Care, Smart Access Control, Smart Cities and Homes. Jan Markendahl and Andres Laya
3. Trends Towards Fragmentation of the Mobile Payment Market in Sweden.
Jan Markendahl and Tatjana Apanasevic
In addition we presented two teaching cases about mobile payments at a teaching session where we also presented ideas on and our approach for education in tele-economics.
There were a lot of theoretical contributions dealing with marketing and sales processes, distribution, purchasing, supply side management, etc. It was quite few papers directly adressing issues related to mobile services and the telecom industry, one example was a paper about mobile advertising.
- How to make a new technological B2B service a profitable business?
Hanna Komulainen
The value of participation for us is in the methodology side, both to get feedback on our own research and to learn from other researchers in other sectors. Two good examples with large value for our IoT research are papers dealing with how to adopt new technology and how to make services starting with products.
- What Service Service Transitions? A critical analysis of servitization processes. Christian Kowalkowski, Daniel Kindström, Heiko Gebauer and Charlotta Windahl
- The Unavoidable Linear Thinking – or the Need to Consider What Type of Economic Model a Forecast is Based Upon.
Alexandra Waluszewski, Malena Ingemansson and Håkan Håkansson
Other useful outcomes from contacts made at the conference were
1. Research collaboration with universities in Norway and Denmark about ICT for healthcare and home care services
2. Invitation to publish case studies in business journals
Finnally, it was a strange feeling in Atlanta with very dark mornings (like December in Sweden) but +30 degrees and high humidity when you went outside
