PhD student in Information Systems and Innovation
Biography
Ben holds a Tripartite MEng in Electronics Engineering from the University of Southampton in the UK, the Universität Fridericiana zu Karlsruhe in Germany and the Ecole Supérieure d'Ingénieurs en Electronique (ESIEE) in France. In addition he holds professional qualifications in marketing (Chartered Institute of Marketing) as well as an MBA from INSEAD in France and an MSc in Information Systems and Innovation Research from The London School of Economics. Prior to re-entering academia in 2007 to start his PhD studies, he worked for twelve years in the telecommunications industry in a variety of roles ranging from network design, to product and commercial management, and marketing and business development. He has worked in a variety of organisations ranging from the big (BT PLC), to the medium (The Cloud Ltd) and the small (fringland Ltd). His commercial focus has always been on delivering mobile products and services. His doctoral work is sponsored by a joint grant between the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and an industry research consortium, the Mobile Virtual Centre of Excellence (Mobile VCE), which is formed of a number of large industry partners, including Vodafone, the BBC, Thales, Alcatel-Lucent, and NEC.
Research Interests
Thesis: 'Unfolding the paradox of control and generativity in mobile platforms enabling service innovation'
Subject areas: digital platforms; mobile information services; platform innovation; control and generativity; business models.
The emergence of mobile platforms such as Apple's iOS and Google's Android operating system has lead to the creation of digital ecosystems enabling the innovation, by external actors, of a wide variety of services, otherwise known as apps, as well as service enablers, such as media player technologies and developer tools. Whilst the generativity of these platforms enables innovation, platform owners need to control for the type of innovation they allow on their platforms in order to protect their profitability and commercial interests. Platform owners exert control over other actors in areas of functional gatekeeping where they have management power. A tension arises as platform owners, who paradoxically attempt to both enable innovation and control it at the same time, vie with external actors, who attempt to get their innovations accepted. This results in negotiations between the two parties, which manifest themselves in complex interactions. The outcome of these interactions are that sometimes the platform owner succeeds in controlling innovation, and that other times the external parties succeed in getting their innovation accepted, intact of with modifications.
The research question that my thesis addresses is: "How can the interactions that occur between actors involved in the innovation of information services on mobile platforms be understood?”. It is supported by two further sub questions: one, "How can these complex interactions be explained using a simpler repertoire of actions?” and two, "What are the mechanisms that help explain these sequences of actions and resulting interactions?". My research is informed by qualitative data concerning examples of service innovation on both Apple's iOS and Google's Android platforms, and the resulting interactions between the parties concerned. Data, concerning these interactions, is obtained from weblogs reporting on events as they unfold. Structural narrative analysis is applied to the corpus of data in order to identify a set of core generative and controlling actions and the underlying structural relationships between these actions. Theories concerning the management of paradox allow for the interpretation of strategies that platform owners use to combine these actions in order to manage both the enablement and control of innovation that their platforms allow.
It is intended that this research will contribute to a better understanding of the dynamics behind the innovation of information services on mobile platforms. This is a justifiable contribution for both practice and academia, as it concerns the interstices of a number of emerging IS and related domains, that are still poorly understood, and whose manifestations are increasingly impacting on our daily lives, both at home and at work.
Supervisor
Teaching
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Classs teacher IS143 - Information Technology and Society
Publications and Papers
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Ben Eaton, Silvia Elaluf-Calderwood, and Carsten Sørensen (2010): A Methodology for Analysing Business Model Dynamics for Mobile Services using Control Points and Triggers. Business Models for Mobile Platforms (BMMP 2010). Berlin.
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Ben Eaton, Silvia Elaluf-Calderwood, and Carsten Sørensen (2010): The Role of Control Points in Determining: Business Models for Future Mobile Generative Systems. Proceedings of joint 9th International Conference on Mobile Business (ICMB 2010) and 9th Global Mobility Roundtable (GMR 2010). Athens
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Ben Eaton (2009): Bitching, Bouncing and Brawling: How Back Channels Brought Colour To Conference Calls, European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS 2009), Verona.
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Aleksi Aaltonen & Ben Eaton (2009): Exploring The Impact Of Real-Time Communication On Media Choice in the Context of Distributed Work, European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS 2009), Verona.