A research study submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Business Administration, School of Management

Research Studies Project Report (M.B.A.) - Asian Institute of Technology, 2000

Telecommunications service industry is becoming highly competitive due to the technological developments and world wide deregulation. In such competitive environment new services have become quite important for the operators to attract new customers as well as to increase the revenue. The growing importance of new services has created new opportunity for the operators like Sonera, which have developed distinctive competencies in the field of new services in mobile telecommunications, to export such services to other operators like Advance Information Service which do not have enough resources and capabilities for developing such new services of their own. But there are different barriers related to source, recipient, service and the environment that hinder such transfer of new services from one operator to another. Thus it is necessary to determine the potential of success of such transfer before making attempts for such transfer. This research work has suggested a method to quantify the probability of success of such transfer. A case of Pay-By-GSM service was studied to calculate the probability of success of transfer from Sonera to AIS. It was found that arduous relationship between the source and recipient, causal ambiguity, absorptive capacity of the recipient and sophistication of customers act as major barriers. Despite these barriers the probability of success of transfer of this service from Sonera to AIS is high. Technology transfer issues also must be considered in detail for the successful transfer of new services from one operator to another. Technology components to be transferred and mode of technology transfer for the successful transfer of Pay-By-GSM service were also identified. Based on these finding some suggestions for the application of the framework and future research work is made