Digital technologies are transforming the landscape of business around the world. Yet it is challenging to construct the necessary platforms and ecosystems to provide commercial digital technologies, and to incorporate these technologies into one’s own business practices. The rollout of 5G technologies demonstrates many of these points vividly.
This chapter will follow 5G from its early days in the lab, to its technically complex development, through to the ecosystem relationships that are driving adoption of 5G around the world. An open innovation perspective is shown to be useful for navigating this long journey of a general-purpose technology, from the lab through to the market.
