Design science perspective on NFC research: Review and research agenda

Abstract

Near Field Communication (NFC), as one of the emerging and promising technological developments, provides means to short range contactless communication for mobile phones and other devices alike. NFC has become an attractive design science research area for many academicians due to its exploding growth and its promising applications and related services. A better understanding of the current status of NFC research is necessary to maintain the advancement of knowledge in NFC research and to identify the gap between theory and practice. In this paper, we present a literature review on NFC. To facilitate the analysis of the literature, we propose a research framework and organize the NFC literature into four major categories (theory and development, applications and services, infrastructure, ecosystem). We contend that due to the nature of NFC (industry high stakes, multidisciplinary research, artifacts development), the design science research paradigm serves an appropriate ground to investigate an extent to which relevance and rigor is achieved. By employing the proposed research framework and design science perspective, we set up a research agenda (research directions and promising research questions) which may help practitioners and academics to achieve a substantial progress in NFC.