Pioneers or laggards? The vacillating wireless race for small organisations

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how small organisations might face emerging challenge of wireless technology and in turn reposition themselves in the marketplace. Empirical findings are derived from two case analyses, one from higher education and the other healthcare sector. They show that smaller organisations, despite their scarce financial and IT resources, were urged
to implement wireless networks and relevant technologies in a similar fashion to other organisations in the field. More specifically, their continuous development and strategic expansion of wireless networks eventually led smaller organisations to newest standard available in the marketplace and allowed them to leapfrog from those pioneers who were normally larger organisations with greater technological and financial resources in the beginning but less flexible structure or adjustable implementation process in the end. Therefore, the traditional categorisation of an organisation’s innovation status would no
longer be adequate because it often develops into a constantly evolving process where laggards (i.e. mostly smaller organisations) and pioneers (i.e. likely large organisations) continuously shifted their technology positions as more emerging
technology standards appeared in the marketplace. Beyond leapfrog effects (such as mobile remote diagnosis system emerging in the healthcare business) and unexpected results (such as an invisible community surfaced in an urban university) that were analysed in this study, future investigation could focus on other emerging organisational and technological factors such as RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technology that would soon penetrate society and the business world.