Smartphone Affordance: Achieving Better Business Through Innovation

Abstract

This paper details a journey of perception, change, leverage, and serendipitous discovery through emerging technologies and learning. Emerging technologies such as mobile technologies and “Smart-phones” have the potential to change the way business executives communicate, interact, learn, and behave. Leveraging learning activities is an imperative function for innovating firms. 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, mobile technologies, specifically “Smart-phones” 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 “Smart-phones” make a difference in people’s professional and personal lives. We have tried in this research to empirically document the ways and means that mobile technologies and “Smart-phones” impact an executive’s productivity and efficiency at work by conducting a series of opened ended interviews with Chief Executive Officers 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 strategic knowledge serendipity and arbitrage (SKARSE™; ibid) as factors shaping and even driving choices made by business leaders and managers with strategic intent and implications.