Industrial innovation processes and societal challenges: How Telenor's mobile phone data became a tool for fighting pandemics

Processes of innovation and scientific breakthroughs are not linear, and their outcomes are notoriously difficult to predefine. This paper contributes with an inductive longitudinal case study of how industrial R&D and innovation activities in a multinational telecom firm contributed to tracking the spread of Covid-19, a societal challenge unrelated to the starting point of the firm's relevant R&D. After twenty years, insights and methods from network analysis using call detail records of mobile phone users eventually ending up in the pandemic response toolbox. We find that the process was dependent upon prolonged activities of key individuals in the firm, serendipitous meetings between people with common interests, and space and support in the organisation for activities with an uncertain effect for the company. The shift from commercial to public health goals was a process of exaptation, and later scaling up was tied to the emergence and perception of Covid-19 as a major societal challenge, which also helped deal with complex issues like privacy to generalise the use of mobile phone data for handling pandemics. This played out over three distinct phases of experimentation, exaptation and scaling up.