| Popis: |
Rural India is an emerging business area with a population of over 800 million people. Despite the strong two-decade long economic growth, most of these people have to cope with a poor selection of both private and public services due to consumer limitations and deficiencies in service infrastructure. Mobile services are rapidly becoming one important exception. Mobile phones are enabling access to various services from banking to agriculture and from healthcare to education for the rural people, and this consequently creates large scale business opportunities for international mobile service developers. In multilingual India, services have to be scaled to various languages and they have to overcome the obstacle of illiteracy in order to reach entire rural audience. The utilization of language technology is one possibility to deal with both issues cost-effectively. This thesis takes a novel approach on internationalization research by examining the prospects that Finnish language technology companies have in the commercial development of multilingual mobile services in rural India through a case study of six SMEs. The results suggest that the prospects are characterized by the internationalization orientation and knowledge orientation of the company, and that Finnish language technology companies are prone to reactive internationalization at best when it comes to developing areas. |
