Business Model Design and Architecture for the Internet of Everything

Smart devices and cyber-physical systems, which are interconnected to IT systems and services, form the basis for the arising Internet of Everything, opening up new economic opportunities for its participants and users beyond its technological aspects and challenges. While today’s e-business scenarios are mostly dominated by a few centralized online platforms, future business models, which will be feasible for the Internet of Everything, need to address special requirements. Such business models, e.g., leveraging the possibilities of smart cities, need to cope with arbitrary combinations of products and services orchestrated into complex products in a highly distributed and dynamic environment. Furthermore, these arbitrary combinations are influenced by real-time context information derived from sensor networks or IT systems, as well as the users’ requirements and preferences. The complexity of finding the optimal product/service combination overstrains users and leads to decisions according to the principle of adverse selection (i.e., choosing good enough instead of optimal). Such e-business models require an appropriate underlying value generation architecture that supports users in this process. In this paper, we develop a business model that addresses these problems. In addition, we present the Distributed Market Spaces (DMS) software-system architecture as a possible implementation, which enables the aforementioned decentralized and context-centric e-business scenario and leverages the commercial possibilities of smart cities.