IEEE International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications
13–16 September 2021 // Virtual Conference // By 6G Flagship

Panel 1: The dawn of 6G business –are we facing a positive disruption?

Tuesday 14 September, 11:00-13:00 (UTC/GMT +3)

The team behind the proposal has produced the world’s first white paper on the Business of 6G (https://www.6gchannel.com/items/6g-white-paper-business-of-6g/). The transition from 5G to 6G will bring about a business disruption in terms of emerging new opportunities, stakeholders, services, and business models by 2030. Successful commercialization of 6G will require converging different technologies and solutions to boost new market creation and transforming existing markets at the levels of users/customers, services, industries,and geopolitics. This panel will identify and shed light to factors that will influence 6G business, provide an outlook toscaling and replicating 6G solutions across use cases and markets in economically feasible way, and identify possible bottlenecks and options regarding the regulatory issues arising around 6G.

Questions

  1. What factors impact the development of businesses toward 6G?
  2. What novel business opportunities could be identified for old and new stakeholders in 6G?
  3. How to speed up the scaling and replication of 6G solutions across different use cases and markets?
  4. How to profit from technology innovations in 6G?
  5. What kind of regulatory bottlenecks we can identify and whatcould we do about them when moving toward 6G?

Moderator

Petri Ahokangas, University of Oulu.

List of Participants

Seppo Yrjölä, Nokia.

Paul Timmers, Oxford university.

Georg Serentschy, Serentschy Advisory Services GmbH.

Biographies

Petri Ahokangas, D.Sc, is Professor or Future digital business at Martti Ahtisaari Institute, Oulu Business School, University of Oulu, Finland and Adjunct Professor at Aalborg University, Denmark. Currently he works for the 6G Flagship at the University of Oulu.His research focuses on creation and transformation of businesses in the context of next generation technologies and the society, with a specific focus on business models, strategies, and ecosystems. The technical focus of his work is on mobile/wireless communications (next generation networks, 5G/6G), smart energy systems, digital healthcare, and smart cities. He has over 190 scientific publications in the field of strategy, internationalization, entrepreneurship, computer science, wireless communications, and foresight. Prior to his current work he has worked in several positions in the Academia, such as professor of international business, senior research fellow and in industry as director, board member and CEO.

Dr. Seppo Yrjölä is a Principal Engineer at Nokia Enterprise and has been building radios from 1G in research, development, innovation, and business development. He incubates and steers opportunities externally with customers, partners, academia, and governments with the purpose of driving growth by innovating holistically from technology to business models. Previously as head of wireless technology for the Networks division at Nokia, his role required to look beyond the product roadmap and identify what new trends, technologies and tools were on the horizon, and determine and validate how those future opportunities fit into the Nokia pipeline. Seppo holds a Doctoral degree in telecommunications from the University of Oulu and is a Professor ofPractice and Adjunct Professor at the Faculty of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, University of Oulu in the field of techno-economics of future wireless communications services and networks. His current mission is digitalizing the 70% ofthe GDP that has not yet been digitalized in order to drive massive productivity growth and new business. With roots in engineering and economics he explores how and why platform-based ecosystemic business models can emerge in the future wireless systems context.

Prof Dr Paul Timmers is research associate at the University of Oxford (Oxford Internet Institute), professor at European University Cyprus and co-founder of the cybersecurity expertise centre Cyber.Cerides. He is also a visiting professor at Rijeka University, senior advisor to EPC Brussels, board member of Digital Enlightenment Forum and supervisory board member of the Estonian eGovernance Academy.He has been Director at the European Commission dealing with EU legislation and funding for cybersecurity, e-ID, digital privacy, digital health, smart cities, e-government. He was also cabinet member of European Commissioner Liikanen and until recently advisor to the European Commission, DG SANTE on digital health. H worked as manager in a large ICT company and co-founded an ICT start-up. Paul holds a physics PhD from Nijmegen University, MBA from Warwick University, was awarded an EU fellowship at UNC Chapel Hill, and obtained cybersecurity qualification at Harvard.

Dr. Georg Serentschy’s professional career spans a period of more than 40 years. It began in the field of nuclear physics, after which he devoted himself to industrial research and development in various industrial high-tech areas such as software development, solar energy, aerospace and telecommunications. After his industrial career, he joined Arthur D. Little, a strategy consulting firm. The next step was to head the Regulatory Authority for Telecommunications in Austria (RTR-GmbH) for more than a decade. The highlight of his regulatory career was the chairmanship and vice-chairmanship of BEREC (Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications). In 2014, he founded his own consulting boutique focused on advising the C-suite and top experts in the digital sector (platforms, telecom, media and technology) on strategy, regulation & competition, spectrum policy, cybersecurity policy and innovation. One of the main focus areas of his consulting work is the strategic positioning of companies in a specific regulatory environment. In parallel, Georg serves as Senior Advisor for the Communication practice and the Public Policy Practice of the global law firm Squire Patton Boggs.