A Business Model Framework for Crowd-Driven IoT Ecosystems

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.