1194 What is a Portal? Antti Ainamo Stanford University, Collaboratory for Research on Global Projects, USA Helsinki School of Economics, Finland Christian Marxt Stanford University, Center for Design Research, USA Copyright © 2007, Idea Group Inc., distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI is prohibited. INTRODUCTION The brief history of Web portals is beginning to be com- mon knowledge for software and engineering designers and researchers specialized on the technologies of the Web (Berners-Lee & Fischetti, 1997). The first Web portals were a product of large government-sponsored “big science” projects in the United States and Europe that spawned private online services, such as AOL (Tuomi, 2002). These new businesses provided access to the Web for a fee. Then, in a second phase, companies such as Yahoo, Alta Vista, and Google appeared. As search engines they enabled users to find other pages on the Web. In contrast to AOL, they provided free access to all free pages to all users who had a technical connection to the Web. Now, in a third stage, many of these traditional search engines have begun their transformation into Web portals to attract and keep a larger audience (Tatnall, in this volume; Webomadia, 2006). In contrast to the above kind of evolutionary knowledge about the evolution of portals, there has been less critical historical analysis and/or synthesis to get a “big picture” of what a portal really is. Especially, there has been a gap in knowledge about the strategic and organizational challenges in terms of further innovations and evolution of portals. In this article we thus ask: what are these strategic and orga- nizational challenges in terms of further innovations and evolution of portals? To answer this question, we adopt, in this article, an architectural and design perspective. The structure of the article is that we first clarify and specify our view of what portal is, and what it is not. We take inspiration from the above evolutionary view of portals to reveal some of the mechanisms underlying the historical evolution in order to map out future path dependencies and remaining room for innovation and new kinds of portals. Within this context, our novel perspective is not to focus only on technology or social history but to weave in also the business case of what is a portal. WHAT IS A PORTAL? In very general terms, defining what a portal is and what it is not is easy. A very precise definition—a specification or operationalization of the concept of Web portal—is more difficult than is defining a portal in general terms. There are many different types of portals and many and varied uses to which they can be put. The term portal takes on a somewhat different meaning depending on the viewpoint of the stakeholder. They can be used for such purposes as business services on demand by third-party providers as HP or IBM, for public services in a regional innovation system, for open innovation within any organization, for purposes of killing time, etc. Despite this challenge of diversity, the concept of portal is now beginning to be established as a term to refer to all human-edited content aggregation that focuses on both or- ganization and personalization of content. 1 Such aggregation typically provides automated search capabilities and other front ending Web services, but also such value-added services as common rooms and collaboration facilities. Thus, portals exist for more than one specific purpose. Rather than being first and foremost a way of categorizing content according for purposes of ranking or grading, for example, a portal is typically provided identity precisely by virtue of robustness of the schemata about its ways and purposes of use. Usually, in the modern usage of the term portal, a Web portal is a gateway to information, services, and so on, on the Internet, whether on the public World Wide Web (WWW) or on a corporate or other proprietary intranet. Any portal is a gateway. It offers a point of access into a broad array of resources and services, such as e-mail, forums, search engines, and online shopping malls. Marketers have discov- ered the portal concept and its advertising potential, making portals a considerable modern “business case” (Korhonen & Ainamo, 2003). Within this modern context, what the concept has gained in array of ways and schemata of use, it has lost some of its clarity. A Google search of the Web in May, 2005, revealed 170 million entries for the word portal, whereas in June, 2006, the same search lead to 1.12 billion entries. Even allowing for a considerable degree of overlap and misuse, portals are now pervasive and it would be difficult to make any use of the Web without encountering one. The study of portals also spans a bewildering range of topics and interest areas. What is peculiar about the portal as a technological concept is that this concept can equally refer to a Web site