How research can help to create commercially successful ubiquitous services

Ubiquitous computing will change the way people live with technology. At the same time it will also affect the way people access and use services. It is obvious that these new ubiquitous services have a lot of business potential. However, before this potential can be fully exploited, we need to understand the crucial factors behind creating commercially successful ubiquitous services. The aim of this chapter is to describe, examine and give proposals for further research in three important research fields which can be seen as the prerequisites for developing commercially successful ubiquitous services. Firstly, people need to understand the basic nature of ubiquitous services, i.e., their unique characteristics. Secondly, people need to know the needs of the customers in order to create value to them so that they will accept and use ubiquitous services. This can be done by involving users into the innovation process of ubiquitous services. And thirdly, people need to understand the value creating networks developing and commercializing the ubiquitous services as well as to find an appropriate business model for describing them. Value creation is impossible without a successful network business model which is yet to be found