Co-opetition During Evolution of Technology Based Service Innovation - The Case of Development of NFC Enabled Services in Nice

Co-opetition is an important characteristic of innovation processes. We illustrate this with reference to a case: a service innovation project in Nice, named Cityzi. Cityzi is a local subprocess in the globally dispersed efforts to develop and implement services enabled by the NFC (Near Field Communication) technique that can be used for mobile communication. The project requires cooperation, also between competing actors, to determine technical interfaces as well as development and implementation of business models for production and use of the services in practice. Due to the heterogeneity of resources that need to be combined, actors from different industrial as well as public policy sectors participate in the project. We apply a network perspective for our analysis of co-opetition during service innovation processes. We relate the Nice project to prior, concurrent and future global and local service innovation processes aiming to implement wireless technology.