The local innovation perspective: Development of mobile-herbal service for Indonesia's mobile cellular market

This paper reports on local innovation in the Indonesian mobile cellular market. From the local perspective, innovation opportunity appears when it suits characteristics of the country and behaviors of its people. The realization of such an opportunity has been enabled by development of a mobile-herbal (m-herbal) service application. The service has been designed according to the following framework: scanning the market demand, defining specific applications, defining the actors, exploring tacit knowledge of the actors, and developing engineering functions for support of implantation innovation and concurrent innovative development. We used the results of a previous market survey emphasizing a need for health-related services in the Indonesian market. Herbal remedies were chosen collectively as the focal point of health-related service development since it is well-known that indigenous methods of treatment using Indonesian natural ingredients are employed commonly. The service has been developed to run on an Android-based smartphone, which connects to the database called Indonesian HerbalDB. It consists of two main features: queries (searches) regarding herbal remedies and a self-evaluation. Users of the service may search the names of traditional Indonesian plants, their local names, and the kinds of diseases that can be treated by using them. Through self-evaluations, users are encouraged to describe their personal perceptions of certain herbal remedies and recommend them to other users. Finally, our proposed framework signifies the importance of communications channels among actors in the mobile cellular network and the necessity of facilitating mutual interaction between multiple actors involved in the development of m-herbal services.