The Internet of Everything: Smart things and their impact on business models

David J Langley,Jenny Van Doorn,Irene C.L Ng,Stefan Stieglitz,Alexander Lazovik,Albert Boonstra

doi:10.1016/j.jbusres.2019.12.035

Abstract

The internet of everything (IoE), connecting people, organizations and smart things, promises to fundamentally change how we live, work and interact, and it may redefine a wide range of industry sectors. This conceptual paper aims to develop a vision of how the IoE may alter business models and the ways in which individuals and organizations create value. We review literature on networked business models and service ecosystems, and show that a clearer understanding is needed of how the IoE will impact on the ways that organizations go about their business at the micro, meso and macro levels. Combining this with an inductive, vignette-based approach, we present a new taxonomy of smart things based on their capabilities and their connectivity. We derive their implications for business models and conclude the paper with propositions that form a research agenda for business researchers.

Highlights

The rise of the Internet of Things (IoT), has the potential to change the world as we know it and will fundamentally change many companies’ business models as well as the way consumers interact with these companies and other stakeholders (Fredette, Marom, Steinert, & Witters, 2012)
The aim of this paper is to describe how smart things in the Internet of Everything (IoE) may impact business models and to propose avenues for future research
We argued that the impact of the IoE on business models increases with higher levels of smartness

Summary

Introduction

The rise of the Internet of Things (IoT), has the potential to change the world as we know it and will fundamentally change many companies’ business models as well as the way consumers interact with these companies and other stakeholders (Fredette, Marom, Steinert, & Witters, 2012). The Internet of Everything expands the IoT concept by adding links to data, people and (business) processes. It comprises other connection-based paradigms such as IoT, Internet of People (IoP), and Industrial Internet (II) (Yang, Di Martino, & Zhang, 2017). In this context we understand the Internet of Everything (IoE) as a network of connections between smart things, people, processes, and data with real-time data/information flows between them

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Conclusion