A Business Model Framework for Crowd-Driven IoT Ecosystems

Abstract

This article describes how the era of hyper-connectivity is characterized by distributed, crowd-centric ecosystems that utilise cutting edge technology so as to harness the collective power, co-creation ability and intelligence of the crowd utilising under open participatory value creation models. The Internet of Things (IoT) has fueled the emergence of such ecosystems that leverage not only the power of physical things connected to the Internet but also the wisdom of the crowd to observe, measure, and make sense of phenomena via user-owned mobile and wearable devices. Existing business modelling literature has to date, placed no research attention on business models for such emerging ecosystems. This article aims to fill this gap by examining the dynamics of crowd-driven IoT ecosystems and introducing a business model framework for such environments, encompassing all relevant value-creating actors, activities and processes, facilitating this way a holistic ecosystem business model analysis.

Análise do negócio da fintech de pagamentos móveis sob a perspectiva do modelo Canvas

“…No caso do contexto em rede, alguns autores especificam perguntas como dimensões para representar o modelo de negócio (Ikävalko, Turkama, & Smedlund, 2018) neste contexto, tais como; who (quem), what (o quê), how (como) e why (porquê). A primeira questão seria o who, que refere-se aos autores que fazem parte do modelo de negócios em rede, bem como os seus papéis e valores; what, seria a proposta de valor que a rede configurada de atores desenvolve e entrega valor para os clientes ( Palo & Tähtinen, 2011); how é a perspectiva de atividades, onde o modelo de negócios é visto como um mecanismo organizacional para formatar e coordenar atividades para criar valor para os clientes e para a rede (Palo & Tähtinen, 2013) e, why seria o alcance dos objetivos estratégicos comuns que faz com que as organizações em um mundo digital e conectado dependam uma das outras integrando valor entre os participantes da rede, bem como os processos e as atividades relacionados ao valor (Ziouvelou & McGroarty, 2018), enfim uma ferramenta de gestão para verificar e controlar a distribuição de valor com uma criação conjunta de valor (Wirtz., Pistoia, Ullrich, & Göttel, 2016).…”

Smart City IoT Services Creation Through Large-Scale Collaboration

“…The architecture presented in [16] has the technical potential to offer experiments as re-usable services but this is not explored by the authors. Several aspects are already tackled to enable IoT services ecosystem, such as architectures [17], [18] and procedures to acquire IoT services [18], or how to generate IoT services business model [19], [20]. The authors of [10] present a proof-of-concept of IoT services marketplace.…”

Interconnected business models: present debates and future agenda

“…Finally, to answer the why question, authors remind us that in the digital and networked world, organizations increasingly depend on each other to achieve common strategic objectives (Iivari et al, 2016). Therefore, the model itself can be used as a boundary object for planning (Heikkilä and Heikkilä, 2010); as a general framework to integrate relevant value network participants and value-related activities and processes (Ziouvelou and McGroarty, 2018); as a management tool to check and control the value distribution with a joint value creation (Wirtz et al, 2016) or to understand business planning in value networks (Ghanbari et al, 2017). In short, a network-oriented view of BMs underlines the idea that there is a different view that can be taken, distinct from the single-firm view.…”

“…They furthermore suggest that the alignment of firms' roles within the ecosystem (in terms of resources, knowledge and complementarities) and firm-level BMs with a network-oriented BM may lead the ecosystem to prevail over its disintegration. Furthermore, Ziouvelou and McGroarty (2018) suggest a next step "crowd-driven ecosystem-centric BM" that is characterized by structures powered by technology, user participation in value creation and open innovation of services. This model, however, brings new interdependence challenges that stem from further enlarging the network boundary to include the crowd as well.…”