Do Smartphones Make for Smarter Business? The Smartphone CEO Study

Abstract

Technology has played a role in human affairs including business for millennia—starting with the lighting of the first fire, the carving of ideograms on the walls of caves, and inventing the first round artifact that would eventually serve as a wheel. In that regard, “smartphones” (are intelligent, wireless, rich-media technologies in the service of smarter business (or SKARSE™-enabled business) (Carayannis, GWU Lectures, 2010)) are the latest developments in a long line of predecessors some illustrious and some infamous; however, there is a qualitative as well as quantitative difference in where, how, and why smartphones make a difference in people’s professional and personal lives. We have tried in this research to empirically document the ways and means that smartphones impact people’s productivity and efficacy at work by conducting a series of semi-structured interviews with top level executives from businesses across a wide swath of business sectors. Our findings further corroborate the presence, role, and impact of what we call “happy accidents” (Carayannis, Industry & Higher Education 22(6): 1–11, 2008) in terms of a strategic knowledge serendipity and arbitrage (SKARSE™ (is a trademarked term of art owned by Carayannis and Clark as of June 2010.)) (ibid) as factors shaping and even driving choices made by business leaders and managers with strategic intent and implications.