The Strategic Adoption of 5G Technology From a Business Model Perspective

Even if 5G is considered an enabling technology, its transformative potential and widespread adoption remain limited. This paper explores how Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) innovate their business models by leveraging 5G. Through an exploratory multiple-case study of Italian MNOs, key determinants concerning innovation in value proposition, creation, and delivery are obtained inductively from interviews and grouped into different 5G business model archetypes. These latter are "Advanced connectivity provider", "Vertical Service Provider", and "Orchestrator". The first focuses on offering 5G as an enabling technology on which end users can build their own applications. The second selects target industries and allows access to a specific service. The third doesn’t own specific knowledge but it acts as the intermediary between a customer and a capable partner’s network, ensuring that the project is carried out and targeting multiple verticals. The research provides both theoretical and practical contributions: from a theoretical standpoint, it contributes to the business model innovation literature by offering empirical work that investigates the strategic adoption of a new technological paradigm focusing on the architecture of the business model rather than a measurement of performance afterwards. Moreover, it contributes to the 5G literature with an empirical study that focuses on the strategic implications of the phenomenon rather than just the technical aspects, and to the enabling technology literature by offering a study that examines an enabling technology from a firm-specific perspective. From the standpoint of practitioners, it can offer managerial guidance on developing suitable 5G business models to promote technology adoption and maintain competitiveness by harnessing the potential applications envisioned with 5G.