Deliverable 01.01 Value Co-creation Mechanisms · 2016-10-15 · 3.3 IoT value co-creation as...
Transcript of Deliverable 01.01 Value Co-creation Mechanisms · 2016-10-15 · 3.3 IoT value co-creation as...
H2020 Work Programme 2014-2015
ICT-30-2015: Internet of Things and Platforms for
Connected Smart Objects
Duration: 24 months
Supporting Internet of Things Activities on Innovation Ecosystems
Dissemination level
PU Public X
PP Restricted to other programme participants (including the Commission Services)
RE Restricted to a group specified by the consortium (including the Commission Services)
CO Confidential, only for members of the consortium (including the Commission Services)
H2020 – UNIFY-IoT Project
Deliverable 01.01
Value Co-creation Mechanisms
Revision : 1.0
Due date : 30-09-2016 (m09)
Actual submission date : 03-10-2016
Lead partner : ISMB
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Summary
No and name D01.01 Value Co-creation Mechanisms Status < Released> Due m09 Date 30-09-2016
Author(s)
Maria Teresa Delgado (ISMB), Michele Osella (ISMB), Claudio Pastrone (ISMB),
Maurizio Spirito (ISMB), Agata Tringale (ISMB), Ovidiu Vermesan (SINTEF), Roy
Bahr (SINTEF), Alex Gluhak (DIGICAT), Fabrice Clari (INNO), Anne Hoeer
(SISAX-M), Frank Bösenberg (SISAX-M), Marco Senigalliesi (HIT), Veronica
Barchetti (HIT).
Editor(s) Michele Osella (ISMB), Maria Teresa Delgado (ISMB), Claudio Pastrone (ISMB),
Maurizio Spirito (ISMB)
DoW This deliverable is an outcome of task T01.01 (Mechanisms for Value Co-Creation).
The task receives inputs from and aligns with the analysis performed in WP02, WP03
and WP04 to characterize the different value axes: monetization, adoption, societal
awareness and acceptance. In fact, IoT co-creation involves redefining the way
organizations, societies, educational systems, etc. engage individuals, customers,
developers, suppliers, partners, and other IoT or application stakeholders, by bringing
them into the process of value creation and engaging them in enriched experiences.
Value co-creation mechanisms have been first defined and then jointly refined with
relevant stakeholders in a workshop, and finally documented in the present
deliverable. The co-creation framework is designed in this task and incrementally
implemented in the next task (T01.02), in which all IoT technology and application
stakeholders will be highly engaged to evaluate how value co-creation works in the
IoT field.
Comments
Document history
V Date Author Description
0.00 16-05-2016 ISMB Template/Initial version.
0.01 23-05-2016 ISMB General information and structure.
0.02 29-08-2016 ISMB Updated version.
0.03 15-09-2016 ISMB Section 3, 4 added. Overall update of the document.
0.04 22-09-2016 ISMB Integrated inputs from SISAX (Section 4.2.1) and HIT (Section
3.5), inputs in section 5.1 added. Section 3.1 updated.
0.05 26-09-2016 SINTEF Updated version. Contribution to DoW and IoT ecosystems
stakeholder mapping.
0.06 29-09-2016 ISMB
SISAX-M
General update of the document integrating updated inputs from
SISAX-M and HIT.
0.07 30-09-2016 ISMB Updated section 4.2.2 based on input from DIGICAT and section
4.2.3 based on inputs from INNO.
0.08 03-10-2016 ISMB Updated overall document and references.
0.09 03-10-2016 ISMB Executive summary and conclusions added.
0.91 04-10-2016 ISMB Section 5.2.3.3 added. Overall review of the document. Document
ready for review.
0.92 06-10-2016 ETSI,
CEA, HIT
Comments provided by reviewers: ETSI and CEA / HIT and
integrated in the document
0.93 07-10-2016 ISMB Final version ready for release.
1.00 07-10-2016 SINTEF Final version released.
Disclaimer
The information in this document is provided as is and no guarantee or warranty is given that the information is fit
for any particular purpose. The user thereof uses the information at its sole risk and liability.
The document reflects only the author’s views and the EC is not liable for any use that may be made of the
information contained therein.
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Table of contents
1. Executive summary ................................................................................................... 6
Publishable summary ....................................................................................................... 6
Non-publishable information ............................................................................................. 6
2. Introduction ............................................................................................................. 7
2.1 Purpose and target group ............................................................................................. 7
2.2 Contributions of partners ............................................................................................. 7
2.3 Relations to other activities in the project ...................................................................... 7
3. UNIFY-IoT value co-creation approach .................................................................... 9
3.1 Value co-creation background ...................................................................................... 9 3.1.1 Theoretical approaches to value co-creation ............................................................. 9 3.1.2 The DART model as reference framework .............................................................. 11 3.1.3 Co-creation meets IoT ............................................................................................. 12
3.2 UNIFY-IoT value co-creation vision ........................................................................... 13
3.3 IoT value co-creation as ‘umbrella’............................................................................. 14
3.4 The scope of IoT value co-creation ............................................................................. 16
3.5 Analysis of relevant co-creation solutions .................................................................... 18 3.5.1 A generic case of co-creation: FIWARE .................................................................. 20 3.5.2 A specific case of co-creation in IoT: SOCIOTAL .................................................... 20 3.5.3 An H2020 case of co-creation: OrganiCity .............................................................. 21 3.5.4 Value co-creation initiatives in the European market .............................................. 22
3.6 Methodological underpinnings ................................................................................... 23
4. The co-creation framework ..................................................................................... 27
4.1 Perspective and outline.............................................................................................. 27
4.2 Pillar 1: Why? – Value axes ....................................................................................... 30 4.2.1 Value axis A - Monetization ..................................................................................... 31 4.2.2 Value axis B - Adoption ............................................................................................ 33 4.2.3 Value axis C - Societal awareness and acceptance ................................................ 36
4.3 Pillar 2: What? – Value proposition ............................................................................ 37
4.4 Pillar 3: Where? – Value network ............................................................................... 40
4.5 Pillar 4: How? – Mechanisms for value co-creation ...................................................... 44
5. Input collection and analysis ................................................................................... 46
5.1 UNIFY-IoT value co-creation questionnaire ................................................................ 46 5.1.1 Questionnaire structure ............................................................................................ 46 5.1.2 Results ..................................................................................................................... 47
5.2 Value co-creation workshop with IoT-EPI projects ....................................................... 52 5.2.1 Overview .................................................................................................................. 52 5.2.2 Value co-creation exercise structure ....................................................................... 53 5.2.3 Results from the value co-creation workshop .......................................................... 53
6. Conclusions ............................................................................................................ 63
7. References .............................................................................................................. 64
8. Appendices ............................................................................................................. 68
Appendix I: IoT Value co-creation framework questionnaire ........................................ 68
Appendix II: Value Co-Creation Workshop .................................................................. 74
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Table of figures
Figure 1. The traditional concept of the market (Source: Prahalad and Ramaswamy 2004) .......... 9
Figure 2. The emerging concept of the market (Source: Prahalad and Ramaswamy 2004) ......... 10
Figure 3. Constellation of actors involved in the IoT domain (source: UNIFY-IoT DoW) ......... 14
Figure 4. Role of value co-creation in UNIFY-IoT project .......................................................... 15
Figure 5. IoT-EPI governance model ............................................................................................ 15
Figure 6. Scope of UNIFY-IoT project (source: UNIFY-IoT DoW) ............................................ 16
Figure 7. ‘Big picture’ of the IoT-EPI value co-creation landscape ............................................. 17
Figure 8. Value co-creation validation funnel ............................................................................... 18
Figure 9. Core business of IoT-EPI RIAs at a glance ................................................................... 27
Figure 10. Target users served by IoT-EPI RIAs (source: IoT-EPI TF01) ................................... 28
Figure 11. Converging trajectories among RIA at technological level ......................................... 28
Figure 12. Converging trajectories among RIA at pilot level ....................................................... 29
Figure 13. Bird’s-eye-view of the UNIFY-IoT value co-creation framework .............................. 29
Figure 14. Portfolio of tools composing the UNIFY-IoT value co-creation framework .............. 30
Figure 15. Value axes in UNIFY-IoT value co-creation framework ............................................ 30
Figure 16. Value axes taxonomy ................................................................................................... 31
Figure 17. IoT mindset shift (source: Smart Design) .................................................................... 32
Figure 18. Monetization taxonomy ............................................................................................... 33
Figure 19. Approaches and features for looking at innovation adoptions .................................... 34
Figure 20. Categories of adopters situated along the product adoption curve .............................. 35
Figure 21. Criteria underlying the societal acceptance presented in the context of the ‘30
elements of value’ (source: Bain) .................................................................................................. 37
Figure 22. Value Proposition Canvas and Business Model Canvas ............................................. 39
Figure 23. The Value Proposition Canvas at a glance .................................................................. 39
Figure 24. Role of the Customer Profile in the Value Proposition Canvas .................................. 40
Figure 25. Role of the Value Map in the Value Proposition Canvas ............................................ 40
Figure 26. IoT value chain (source: Telecom Circle) ................................................................... 42
Figure 27. Transition from value chain to value network in the IoT area (source: ISMB) ........... 43
Figure 28. Short-listed formalisms for value network mapping ................................................... 44
Figure 29. Tangible outcomes foreseen by the IoT-EPI projects .................................................. 47
Figure 30. Code and/or Open APIs released as Open Source ....................................................... 47
Figure 31. Open source licenses selected by the IoT-EPI Projects ............................................... 48
Figure 32. Type of value creation approach being implemented in IoT-EPI projects .................. 48
Figure 33. Use of value co-creation mechanisms and/or approaches within organizations as
innovation drivers .......................................................................................................................... 48
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Figure 34. Value co-creation framework already defined within the organization ...................... 49
Figure 35. Value co-creation methodologies being implemented within the organizations ......... 49
Figure 36. Use of value co-creation mechanisms and/or approaches within IoT-EPI projects as
innovation drivers .......................................................................................................................... 50
Figure 37. Value co-creation methodologies being used in IoT-EPI projects .............................. 50
Figure 38. Value co-creation methodologies that could be implemented among IoT projects .... 51
Figure 39. Stakeholders targeted by your organization to exploit IoT project results .................. 51
Figure 40. Most relevant stakeholders targeted by organization to exploit IoT project results .... 51
Figure 41. Stakeholders directly leveraging IoT project results ................................................... 52
Figure 42. Value co-creation workshop during the IoT-EPI meeting in Valencia, Spain ............ 53
Figure 43. Projects’ assets from Group 1 ...................................................................................... 54
Figure 44. Initial set of identified joint developments among IoT-EPI projects ........................... 54
Figure 45. Value Proposition Canvas for a "toolkit for capturing requirements and market
insights" (Group 1) ........................................................................................................................ 55
Figure 46. Group 1 participants after the co-creation exercise ..................................................... 56
Figure 47. Projects’ assets from Group 2 ...................................................................................... 57
Figure 48. Value Proposition Canvas for a "multi-stage supply chain orchestrator" (Group 2) ... 58
Figure 49. Projects’ assets from Group 3 ...................................................................................... 60
Figure 50. Possible Joint Developments identified by Group 3 .................................................... 60
Figure 51. Value Proposition Canvas for an "Easy-access data toolkit" (Group 3) ...................... 61
Figure 52. Picture of group 3 participants after the workshop ...................................................... 62
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List of tables
Table 1. Collection of papers highlighting the role of IoT in value co-creation ........................... 12
Table 2. Value co-creation initiatives relevant for the European market ...................................... 22
Table 3. Stages of the value co-creation framework development ............................................... 25
Table 4. Three-pronged business model in telco sector ................................................................ 32
Table 5. Difference between value chain and value network (from Stabell & Fjeldstad [58]) .... 41
Table 6. Benchmark of short-listed formalisms for value network mapping ................................ 44
Table 7. Value co-creation mechanisms ....................................................................................... 45
Table 8. Identified assets and corresponding IoT-EPI project (Group 1) ..................................... 54
Table 9. Value Proposition Canvas summary (Group 1) .............................................................. 56
Table 10. Identified assets and corresponding IoT-EPI project (Group 2) ................................... 57
Table 11. Problem-solution fit summary from the Value Proposition Canvas (Group 2) ............ 59
Table 12. Identified assets and corresponding IoT-EPI project (Group 3) ................................... 60
Table 13. Problem-solution fit summary from the Value Proposition Canvas (Group 3) ............ 61
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1. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Publishable summary
The present deliverable describes the value co-creation framework defined within the context of
UNIFY-IoT WP01. The aim of this framework is to facilitate the mutual generation of value
through the development of products and services leveraging the IoT platforms made available
by IoT-EPI projects by means of participatory design and socio-technical involvement.
The co-creation is aimed to enhance the speed and scope of innovation, generation of customer-
supplier B2B partnerships, networking of stakeholders as well as to enable the open API
developers' community to interact with one another and with other IoT stakeholders. IoT co-
creation involves redefining the way organizations, education systems and society engage
individuals, customers, developers, suppliers, partners, and other IoT-related stakeholders, by
bringing them into the process of value creation and making them part of enriched experiences.
The value co-creation framework defined in this document considers both how to co-create value
and how to evaluate it. More specifically, a taxonomy to assess the co-created value in terms of
monetization, IoT platforms adoption, societal awareness and acceptance has been defined in
collaboration with other UNIFY-IoT Work Packages (i.e., WP02, WP03 and WP04).
This deliverable is structured as follows:
Section 2 provides a general introduction to the document including the purpose of the
deliverable and the relation to other activities in the project.
Section 3 provides a bird’s-eye-view of the overarching UNIFY-IoT co-creation
approach, including a brief summary of the existing theoretical approaches to value co-
creation and notes on how this concept has been exploited until now in the IoT domain.
Section 4 provides a detailed description of the proposed value co-creation framework
and its four (4) pillars (i.e., ‘why’, ‘what’, ‘where’ and ‘how’) including the links to
monetization, adoption and societal awareness and acceptance issues.
Section 5 provides an in-depth analysis of the results collected from two very important
initiatives that UNIFY-IoT has implemented to define and preliminarily test the coined
value co-creation framework, through the distribution of an IoT value co-creation
questionnaire and the realization of a hands-on workshop respectively.
Finally, section 6 contains a summary of the final remarks and conclusions while section 8
gathers the relevant appendices to this document.
Non-publishable information
None.
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2. INTRODUCTION
2.1 Purpose and target group
The main purpose of this deliverable is to present in-depth the value co-creation framework
defined within the scope of the WP1 of the UNIFY-IoT project. The framework has the mission
to facilitate the mutual generation of value through the development of joint products and
services using the IoT platforms stemming from IoT-EPI projects. The target group of the
defined framework are mainly the IoT-EPI projects, but include also other relevant stakeholders
associated to the IoT ecosystem and value network. Furthermore, the described framework can
be generalized to be implemented in other technological contexts with some adaptations.
2.2 Contributions of partners
ISMB coordinated all activities aimed at designing a participatory value co-creation framework
to enable relevant IoT stakeholders to cooperate and jointly co-create value for themselves.
Moreover, ISMB acted as moderator of dialogues about value propositions taking place among
the identified IoT ecosystem stakeholders, so that they will be able to include their views of
value into the value co-creation process.
SINTEF contributed to identify the IoT value creation, and co-creation mechanisms developed in
the IoT ecosystems and how these involves the close cooperation with the end-users. In the new
foreseen IoT business models it is expected that the IoT stakeholders establish relationships to
mutually undertake the development of innovative IoT products and applications. In this context,
the activities will focus to identify how innovative companies are willing to form partnerships by
participating in new IoT products/applications/platforms development process. This will involve
as well the IoT end users, as customers are linked with the innovation IoT companies during the
entire innovation process, and create a space for mutual understanding, learning and value co-
creation.
DIGICAT guaranteed alignment with WP03 and contributed to the definition of mechanisms to
co-create value in terms of platform adoption in IoT ecosystems.
INNO guaranteed alignment with WP04 and contributed to the definition of mechanisms to co-
create value in terms of societal awareness and educational promotion in IoT ecosystems.
SISAX-M guaranteed alignment with WP02 and contributed to the definition of mechanisms to
co-create economic value in IoT ecosystems.
HIT supported the investigation of the best strategies to implement for engaging stakeholders
and enable value co-creation; this task has been pivotal to all activities done in WP02, WP03 and
WP04.
2.3 Relations to other activities in the project
The value co-creation framework defined in this deliverable is closely related to the parallel
activities being carried out in all other WPs of the UNIFY-IoT project as described above.
WP02, WP03 and WP04 provided relevant inputs concerning the three value axes (i.e.,
monetization, adoption and societal awareness and acceptance) to ensure the alignment of the
defined framework with these dimensions; WP6 contributed to identify the IoT value creation,
and co-creation mechanisms developed within the IoT ecosystems and how these involve close
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cooperation with the end-user. Furthermore, the defined value co-creation framework took into
consideration the results from the IoT-EPI Task Forces to guarantee the alignment of the
proposed approach with the ongoing activities and developments made by all IoT-EPI projects.
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3. UNIFY-IOT VALUE CO-CREATION APPROACH
3.1 Value co-creation background
Co-creation is seen as a new framework of reference in service marketing and business
management [1] widely used to describe a shift in considering organization as a definer of value
to a more participative process in which people and organizations together generate and develop
meaning [2]: hence, co-creation allows companies and consumers to create value through
interaction.
Taking this perspective, the traditional system of value creation – developed during the
nineteenth century and based on a company-centric view of the world – is being challenged
today, not by new competitors but by communities of connected, informed, empowered, and
active consumers. The focus, in fact, is shifting from a company-centric to a customer-centric
value co-creation process.
3.1.1 Theoretical approaches to value co-creation
Since the early 2000s the concept of value co-creation has been discussed in the management
literature, spawning the blossoming of different theoretical approaches to value co-creation [3] :
S-D logic perspective, service-science approach, many-to-many marketing perspective,
innovation and development of new products, the post- modern marketing perspective of co-
creation
Prahalad and Ramaswamy [4][5][6][7] introduce co-creation by describing the changing roles of
customers in the industrial system. In the traditional economies, in fact, value creation occurred
inside the firm and outside the market, during the manufacturing process. The company had the
unilateral role of creating value, enclosed in the concept of ‘value chain’. Firm and customers
had distinct roles of production and consumption, respectively. In this traditional concept of
market (company-centred), interactions are not source of value creation and communication
generally were unilateral (from the company to the customer) as visualized in Figure 1.
Figure 1. The traditional concept of the market (Source: Prahalad and Ramaswamy 2004)
However, times have changed and consumers’ role has shifted from passive to active.
Customers, in fact, are no more isolated, but connected, informed, and networked since they
have access to more information than before and expect transparency and quality from
companies. They can interact with firms and the service value perceived is related to his/her
experience, that is individual and contextual. Value is now co-created during the interaction and
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it is unique to each consumer (Figure 2). For all these reasons, quality of co-creation experience
is as important as the quality of the firm’s products and processes and managers cannot disregard
it.
Figure 2. The emerging concept of the market (Source: Prahalad and Ramaswamy 2004)
The S-D logic approach
Vargo and Lusch [8] pointed out that products always include service elements, because it is
their usage that matters to consumers: along these lines, the Services Dominant logic model (S-D
logic) connects what the organization offers at the point of purchase to usage by consumers over
time.
The traditional goods-dominant logic is tied to ‘value in exchange’ concept, where value is
produced by the firm and distributed to the market [9]: value occurs when the product is
exchanged in the marketplace.
Conversely, in S-D logic value is rooted in the ‘value in use’ notion, where the value creation
process occurs through joint and reciprocal interactions among providers and beneficiaries
integrating resources [10]. During the interaction, the parties can affect each another and the firm
makes sure that value in use equates to the value proposition [11].
While embracing such an approach, firms need to find innovative ways to become part of the
consumption process and create interaction points along the ‘customer journey’.
The service-science approach to co-creation
Service science had its genesis in IBM in 20041 and it is a discipline that largely overlaps with S-
D logic, but in comparison with it, the service science approach advocates a more macro
perspective on value co-creation. Under the service science lens, value co-creation is “the
integration of existing resources with those available from a variety of service systems that can
contribute to system well-being as determined by the system’s environmental context” [12].
Service systems are value co-creation configurations composed by people, organizations, shared
information, and technology connected internally and externally to other systems by value
propositions [13][14]. Each service system co-creates value through integrating existing
resources with those from other service systems.
A crucial aspect of systems is that they are dynamic and potentially self-adjusting, reconfiguring
themselves [15]. Traditionally, service research has studied service systems with a focus on
dyadic relationships between the company and its customer. Further research is indeed to address
value creation in service systems that offer services not for a client, but for a value network,
taking into account the interactions among multiple actors.
1 http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/servicescience
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Many to many marketing approach
This approach is focused on the importance of customers networks and of a multitude of actors –
such as intermediates, employees, neighbours, and society in general – in co-creation of value.
Edvarsson et al. [16] have introduced a social constructionist approach to value co-creation
based on a social context: Instead of value in use, they prefer to adopt the concept of value in
social context to capture the holistic nature of value.
Customer in product/service development process
While acknowledging a more active role of customers in value co-creation, firms are
increasingly engaging them in their new product/service development process: businesses are
motivated to harness the creative potential of their consumer to uncover their latent needs.
A study by Nambisan and Nambisan [19] have identified five customer roles in innovation and
value co-creation: product conceptualizer, product designer, product tester, product support
specialist and product marketer. According to this framework, customers have a propelling role
in every step of the value chain.
Post-modern approach
The post-modern marketing perspective of co-creation focuses on the interventionist role of
consumers in the design and provision of supplies for the market, defining consumers as
‘prosumers’ [17]. Furthermore, the perspective of consumer-culture theory conceives co-creation
as a means for attaining symbolic and cultural values in connection with the supply of the
market, enabling consumers to achieve their projects and goals [18] .
The co-existence of different approaches to the co-creation of value suggests that diverse fields
and perspectives deploy co-creation enhancing different aspects. Some perspectives give more
relevance to firms' value (S-D Logic), some to the process of how value develops (service
science, many-to-many marketing) and other to customers' value (post-modern marketing and
consumer-culture theory).
3.1.2 The DART model as reference framework
As the consumer-company interaction becomes the locus of value creation, Prahalad and
Ramaswamy [6] propose a framework to better understand the process of co-creation. It is
composed by four building blocks of interaction: Dialogue, Access, Risk-Benefits, and
Transparency and it is better known as the DART Model.
Dialogue
Dialogue means interactivity, engagement, and a propensity to act on both sides: dialogue
implies shared learning and communication between two equal problem solvers and creates and
maintains a loyal community.
Access
Dialogue is possible if consumers have the same access and transparency to information.
Because of ubiquitous connectivity, it is possible for a consumer get access to information from
the community of other consumers as well as from the firm.
Transparency
Companies have traditionally benefited from information asymmetry between the consumer and
the firm. That asymmetry is rapidly disappearing. Firms can no longer assume opaqueness of
prices, costs, and profit margins. And as information about products, technologies, and business
systems becomes more accessible, creating new levels of transparency becomes increasingly
desirable.
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Risk assessment
Dialog, access, and transparency can lead to a clear assessment by the consumer of the risk-
benefits of a course of action and decision. Risk here refers to the probability of harm to the
consumer. If consumers are active co-creators, should they shoulder responsibility for risks as
well? The debate about informed consent and the responsibilities of companies and consumers
will likely continue for years. However, we can safely assume that consumers will increasingly
participate in co-creation of value. They will insist that businesses inform them fully about risks,
providing not just data but appropriate methodologies for assessing the personal and societal risk
associated with products and services.
3.1.3 Co-creation meets IoT
Literature on value co-creation describes not only the shift from a company-centric to a
customer-centric value co-creation process, but also how IoT technologies are now involved in
vale creation process.
The following table collects a list of selected papers related to co-creation contextualized in the
IoT realm.
Table 1. Collection of papers highlighting the role of IoT in value co-creation2
Paper Abstract
Object-Generated Content and Knowledge
Sharing: the Forthcoming Impact of the Internet
of Things
Solima, L., Della Peruta, M.R. & Del Giudice, M. J
Knowl Econ (2016) 7: 738.
People use the network to obtain information and social
networks to share with others their interests, as well as
their social, professional and personal experiences,
including their feedback on products and services they
have used.
IoT technologies can offer information and data coming
from “smart objects” and help producers and consumers to
make decision and co-create value.
Internet of Things and Co-creation of Value
Thomas Mejtoft,
Internet of Things (iThings/CPSCom), 2011
International Conference on and 4th International
Conference on Cyber, Physical and Social
Computing (2011) 672 - 677
This paper highlights that the complexity of value creation
grows way beyond two-dimensional value chains and
value networks to include other self-supporting systems,
i.e., the IoT.
The article introduces a conceptual model of value creation
based on the development of IoT. The model can be
divided in three layers of value creation: manufacturing
function (the connected things), supporting function (the
controlled thing) and the co-creative function (the
independent thing).
Enabling Participative Marketing through the
Internet of Things
Antonio J. Jara, and Antonio F. Skarmeta, Maria
Concepcion Parra, 2013, 27th International
Conference on Advanced Information Networking
and Applications Workshops.
This paper is focused on how IoT can extend the social
media marketing and the values-driven marketing towards
a more interactive and participative marketing. In
particular the article presents how identification
technologies such as NFC, RFID, QR in conjunction with
the legacy barcodes are used to build a novel marketing
based on the active participation from the prosumers.
Participation allows to build a cooperative reputation of
the brand and the products through the collective
intelligence.
Determining Human Dynamics through the
Internet of Things
Antonio J. Jara, Yann Bocchi, Dominique Genoud,
The IoT capabilities extend the potential of the artificial
intelligence to build solutions based on the understanding
of human behaviours. The so called Human Dynamics aim
to describe in real-time the human behaviour and
2 https://www.visioncritical.com/5-examples-how-brands-are-using-co-creation/
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2013, IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conferences on
Web Intelligence (WI) and Intelligent Agent
Technology (IAT).
activities. This work analyses the ecosystem defined
through the triangle formed by Big Data, Smart Cities and
Wearable Computing to determinate human dynamics. For
this purpose, the life-cycle of human dynamics
determinations in Smart Cities have been analysed in order
to determinate the current status of the technology,
challenges, and opportunities.
Internet of Things Business Models
Chan, H.C.Y. (2015) Internet of Things Business
Models. Journal of Service Science and
Management, 8, 552-568.
DOI: 10.4236/jssm.2015.84056
The purpose of this paper is to propose a framework that
integrate the Business Model based on the three
dimensions “Who”, “Where”, and “Why” with the IoT
strategy category, tactics, and value chain elements, with
the intention of addressing “How”. “Who” describes
collaborating partners, which builds the “Value Network”.
“Where” describes sources of value co-creation rooted in
the layer model of digitized objects, and “Why” describes
how partners benefit from collaborating within the value
network.
3.2 UNIFY-IoT value co-creation vision
Looking at the ultimate mission of UNIFY-IoT – namely, to stimulate the collaboration between
EU-funded projects related to IoT and between potential IoT platforms in order to set solid
foundations for their sustainability – the notion of value-co-creation emerges as key enabler for
involving a variety of heterogeneous yet complementary stakeholders (from large scale
companies to SMEs, passing through end users, governmental bodies and NGOs) into an open
innovation ecosystem.
The establishment of a European ecosystem in this vein intends to forge fruitful synergies, set
appropriate standards and introduce support measures to ensure that the cooperation among a
variety of actors could result into the “co-create more – win more” principle set in UNIFY-IoT
DoW.
According to UNIFY-IoT vision, this principle materializes in the uptake of cutting-edge,
integrated IoT offerings (including turn-key ones) harnessing a common technological
infrastructure and a set of capabilities and assets provided by several actors, all this while
contributing to tackle a number of grand societal challenges and democratizing the access to IoT-
related know-how. This commitment brings to the fore the ‘triangulation’ that lies at the core of
UNIFY-IoT’s agenda among technological excellence, business ambition and the quest for
positive and lasting impact on the European society as a whole.
Such vision has shaped the advent of IoT-EPI Initiative, set by UNIFY-IoT in concert with Be-
IoT and the European Commission with the intent of federating the new EU-funded H2020 RIA
projects about IoT platform development (i.e., INTER-IoT, BIG IoT, AGILE, symbIoTe,
TagItSmart!, VICINITY and bIoTope), which will benefit from a total funding of € 50M within
a time-frame of three years (2016-2018).
The goal of such an initiative is to establish a vibrant IoT ecosystem, which can pave the way for
significant scale-up of IoT solutions thanks to the interoperability with other platforms and
services. In this sense, value co-creation is considered the prominent mechanism for
fostering the blossoming of joint undertakings within a constellation of actors that
gravitate around RIA consortia (see Figure 3, coming from UNIFY-IoT DoW).
Once contextualized the nature of value co-creation into the IoT-EPI landscape, it is time to
better characterize the distinctive traits of this phenomenon.
As put by UNIFY-IoT DoW, value co-creation is meant to bring together a variety of partners to
work towards a mutually agreed outcome where common problems are identified. An important
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advancement was provided by UNIFY-IoT team on the occasion of the IoT-EPI Common
Workshop, held in Valencia in June 2016.
Figure 3. Constellation of actors involved in the IoT domain (source: UNIFY-IoT DoW)
In fact, an enhanced definition was unveiled in the “Value Co-Creation Workshop” led by ISMB
team. In this working definition, value co-creation is about federating stakeholders to build a
European IoT ecosystem by working together on mutually agreed joint developments, along a
number of axes such as (inter alia):
Tangible outcomes and technical solutions (e.g., common APIs);
Pilots (e.g., approaches for recruiting, evaluation, benchmarking);
Business models frameworks, exploitation roadmaps;
Approaches for community building around platforms and for fostering adoption;
Educational initiatives.
Thus, value co-creation in IoT-EPI may occur both within RIAs and among RIAs, where
common opportunities/challenges are identified. Moreover, value co-creation in IoT-EPI is not
limited to the contours of the recently-established RIA ecosystem, but rather leverages existing
outcomes of previous/running IoT projects (e.g., FP7), as well as assets and know-how brought
in by external players (e.g., end users of solutions, communities of practice). This means that
value co-creation – as intended by UNIFY-IoT – has the potential to introduce an unprecedented
range of opportunities that can materialize into a comprehensive open innovation ecosystem. In
this context, co-creation practices dynamically fetch tangible and intangible resources for rapidly
combining them into joint efforts addressing common interests.
3.3 IoT value co-creation as ‘umbrella’
The broad spectrum of joint developments falling under the banner of IoT value co-creation lays
bare that IoT value co-creation is not an isolated concept unveiled by UNIFY-IoT project, but
rather an ‘umbrella’ that encompasses under a common roof a variety of themes already under
discussion in the IoT community, which can be aligned and channelled towards a common
purpose thanks to a shared vision.
Such an approach is corroborated by the WBS adopted by UNIFY-IoT consortium (see Figure
4), which clarifies how value co-creation can be portrayed as a common thread running through
all WPs with the intent of synchronizing and orchestrating them. In this setting, while the six
Task Forces have been instantiated to cover prominent themes lying at the core of the European
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IoT agenda (i.e., innovation, platform interoperability, acceleration, business models, educational
platforms, international cooperation), value axes (which are reflected in WP2, WP3 and WP4 of
UNIFY-IoT) have been schematized to represent main dimensions of value generation. Value
co-creation is not mapped into a specific Task Force but somehow is linked to all of them.
Figure 4. Role of value co-creation in UNIFY-IoT project
UNIFY-IoT value co-creation experts are members of the various Task Forces and periodically
organize coordination workshops (such as the one held in Valencia and the upcoming one
scheduled in Vienna in conjunction with the IoT-EPI Meet & Review) and joint initiatives for
testing new possible collaborations within the IoT-EPI ecosystem. Hence, IoT-EPI governance
model sees co-creation as the glue (see Figure 5) that allows to amalgamate different priorities
(e.g., the ones covered by Task Forces) and to pursue joint initiatives that are deemed relevant
from multiple perspectives (e.g., the ones related to value axes).
Figure 5. IoT-EPI governance model
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3.4 The scope of IoT value co-creation
To deepen the understanding of IoT value co-creation as intended by UNIFY-IoT, it is essential
to draw a line for setting the contours of this phenomenon.
To this end, Figure 6 (situated in UNIFY-IoT DoW) aims to illustrate the scope of UNIFY-IoT
project: as a matter of fact, UNIFY-IoT covers the interactions occurring among three main
actors that are key in the IoT open innovation ecosystem, namely RIAs, adopters and end users.
Thus, the scope of IoT value co-creation encompasses these three entities and their
interdependencies with the rest of the IoT galaxy.
Figure 6. Scope of UNIFY-IoT project (source: UNIFY-IoT DoW)
A ‘big picture’ of the resulting IoT-EPI value co-creation landscape is visualized in Figure 7.
The roles of involved actors are as follows:
IoT platforms are existing technological platforms that make available data and services
generated by an array of connect devices and objects. For an in-depth mapping of IoT
platforms, the reader is referred to D03.01.
RIAs are projects funded by the European Commission in response to the H2020 ICT30-
2015 call, which are aimed to overcome the fragmentation of vertically-oriented closed
systems, architectures and application areas. Such RIAs are the fundamental nodes of the
IoT-EPI ecosystem. They offer a dynamic infrastructure that abstracts and virtualizes
afore-mentioned IoT platforms while making them interoperable with other sources, thus
covering multiple technologies (e.g., sensors, actuators, intelligent artefacts, gateways,
cloud computing environments).
Adopters are organizations (e.g., SMEs, start-ups) or individuals (e.g., open-API
developers, makers) that are willing to build products, services, systems and applications
on top of the common infrastructure offered by RIAs instead of building in-house an
entire stack of technologies, hence reducing time-to-market, saving costs and fostering
interoperability with other services.
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End users are the persons for whom the fit-for-purpose solutions are designed. As part of
an open innovation ecosystem, not only they act as mere consumers but they are also
active co-creators of value: as connected, informed, and networked ‘prosumers’ [20],
they interact with service providers in bi-directional fashion thanks to socio-technical
touchpoints offered by IoT-EPI (e.g., hackathons, focus groups, interviews).
Key interaction patterns among them are:
Technological reuse, i.e., the action performed by RIAs when engaging with existing IoT
platforms to access a diversified array of datasets and services.
Service composition, i.e., the action performed by adopters when selectively picking API
resources offered by one or more RIAs (if possible, in a ‘one-stop-shopping’ manner) to
compose in a modular way fit-for-purpose products, services, systems and applications
answering market needs and/or societal challenges.
Market proposition, i.e., the action performed by adopters in delivering to end users the
value proposition crafted by them.
Figure 7. ‘Big picture’ of the IoT-EPI value co-creation landscape
Drawing such an IoT value co-creation landscape, three dimensions of IoT value co-creation of
interest for UNIFY-IoT (see ellipses in Figure 7) can be devised and prioritized according to
UNIFY-IoT DoW and IoT-EPI agenda.
Value exchange: this nuance of value co-creation captures RIAs and adopters working
together to design, test and validate demand-driven solutions and features that RIAs will
unveil. In such a setting, RIAs still steer technological innovation, but adopters have a
seat at the (head of the) table acting as partner, solvers and shapers into the open
innovation process.
Synergies among RIAs through TFs: these horizontal synergies are meant to share assets
and core competencies, valorise technological complementarities and pursue joint
exploitation roadmaps. Mutual benefits have to do primarily with economies of scale and
economies of scope, reduction of risk and uncertainty as well as novel revenue streams
stemming from tapping into new resources, products and channels.
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Involvement of end users: this type of co-creation resembles the original notion of
customer co-creation [7], which witnesses the emergence of empowered end users [21]
seeking greater input and control over product development activity [22]. Along these
lines, RIAs and adopters may provide customers with information and tools that enable
them to take a more proactive role in product/service design [23] in various manners
(e.g., co-designing, collaborating, submitting, tinkering) [24].
The three dimensions of IoT value co-creation are reflected in the three-pronged logic that is
used at litmus test for assessing the extent to which a given joint development is worth of being
undertaken. In practical terms, this logic (known in the project jargon with the name of ‘value
co-creation validation funnel’, portrayed in Figure 8) has been adopted and refined by UNIFY-
IoT co-creation experts in workshops, tutorials and meetings held with RIA consortia.
Each dimension of IoT value co-creation is associated to a criterion used to evaluate the viability
of a given joint development.
1. First, market traction assesses whether the value exchange involving RIAs and adopters
is turned into a product/service having a market potential, in the absence of which there is
no motivation to trigger the joint development as it does not answer adopters’ needs.
2. Secondly, mutual benefits pinpoint the presence of advantages for more than one player
of the IoT-EPI ecosystem. Should it be the case, several RIAs have incentive to work
together along a common trajectory: if this does not hold true, any horizontal synergy
will come to light.
3. Moreover, the measure of societal relevance points out whether the joint development
solves tough problems for end users, thus corroborating the demand-pull nature of the
value co-creation approach proposed by UNIFY-IoT.
Figure 8. Value co-creation validation funnel
3.5 Analysis of relevant co-creation solutions
Co-creation is the process where companies and end-users work together to create better ideas,
products and services. IoT value co-creation is an emerging concept bringing new business
models and the emergence of innovation solutions that requires the adoption of new frameworks
for business exploration. Value co-creation is associated with the opportunity to gain competitive
advantage by developing unique products, services, competences, together with the appropriate
organizational resources and technological capabilities, aiming at better satisfying end-users’
demands for IoT products, services and experiences.
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The process of co-creation in IoT ecosystems involves stakeholders across the IoT architectural
layers cooperating to design and implement solutions based on a shared vision to achieve
economic gains and address common societal challenges. The co-creation in IoT ecosystems
represents a fundamental shift in interaction between different stakeholders in the value chains
and value networks belonging to business, social and public sectors to create shared value.
Co-creation is described as “viewing markets as forums for organisations and active customers to
share, combine and renew each other’s resources and capabilities in order to create value through
new forms of interaction and learning” [25]. In the field of IoT this is translated to the shift from
the traditional active firm/passive end-user construct of the past to the new role of the end-user
from passive recipient to active co-creator in the value creation process.
In the IoT applications, the end-users do not receive value only through the purchase of products
and services. In IoT many applications the end users are interacting with an IoT ecosystem
formed by a network of firms and end-users/consumers communities in order to satisfy their
unique choices/preferences and the value they obtain comes from a total of products, services
and experiences.
In this new reality context, the traditional system of company-centric value creation is not valid
anymore and a new frame of reference for value creation is evolving and centred on co-creation
of value concept. In IoT applications due to the connectivity dimension the role of the end-
user/customer in the industrial/consumer/business system is changing from isolated to connected,
from unaware to informed, from passive to active. The new role is determined by information
access, global view on companies, products, services, technologies, performance, prices,
networking without regard for geographic or social barriers, experimentation to develop digital
products, services, experiences; activism as end-users can better make choices.
In IoT applications companies can no longer act autonomously, designing products, services,
experiences and developing production processes without being involved in ecosystems, and
value networks with interfaces to the end-user/consumers.
The collaboration in IoT ecosystems forms the basis for co-creation and changing dynamics of
interaction between the end-users/consumers and the stakeholders that participate in the IoT
ecosystem space. The new IoT value creation space is a competitive space centred on co-creation
products, services, experiences developed through purposeful interactions between the end-
users/consumers and a network of companies and end-user/consumer communities integrated
into an IoT ecosystem.
In a specific IoT ecosystem, value lies in the co-creation product, service, experience of a
stakeholder, at a point in time, in a defined location, in the context of an event. In this new
environment, the future of competition lies in a new approach to value creation, based on an
individual-centred co-creation of value between end-users/consumers and companies involved in
a particular IoT ecosystem.
Prior to taking a look at some initiatives that characterise the recourse to co-creation in the IoT
field, it is important to remind that the first step to define a co-creation solution implies the
detection of involved players. Currently we have two different format.
The first is closer to the open innovation paradigm [26]: it foresees the use of purposive inflows
and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation, and expand the markets for external
use of innovation, respectively [26]. By making the surface of the innovation funnel porous,
firms can use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market,
thus opening their innovation borders to vendors, customers and even competitors to increase the
imports and exports of novel stimuli [28]. When one of the external resources is the final
customer, from the first format we move to the second one: it refers to any act of collective
creativity which means that creativity is shared by two or more people [29]. Indeed, it is an
approach that enables a wide range of people to have a creative contribution in the formulation
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and solution of a problem. The more the customers (in the UNIFY-IoT, we may consider under
this banner both adopters and end-users) are involved in the creation process, the more we can
talk about co-creation.
Coming to co-creation examples of interest to UNIFY-IoT, the project has selected three cases in
the research domain which are described in the following, one of them is the FIWARE European
initiative, the second one is related to an FP7 project called SOCIOTAL, while the third one
concerns a recent H2020 FIRE project named OrganiCity.
From a commercial market level, Table 2 instead collects a short-list of selected value co-
creation initiatives relevant for the European IoT market.
3.5.1 A generic case of co-creation: FIWARE
Among the many initiatives that took advantage of co-creation process, it is worth to talk about
the experience of FI-PPP program and in particular, of the FIWARE platform used for smart city
solutions.
FIWARE3 has been enabling the co-creation of innovative, portable and interoperable digital
products and services while engaging public administrations and private developers to
collaborate and deliver the ICT solutions and context-aware applications that best suit the needs
of each community, paving the way for a Digital Single Market for smart cities.
The support that this open source platform has been providing to the Open and Agile Smart
Cities (OASC) initiative and the increasing number of relevant partnerships has pushed
FIWARE to become not only the de facto standard for cities joining the OASC, but also the key
for third-party developers and data providers to profit from this smart revolution and to stimulate
a new and sustainable digital economy which is increasingly becoming reality.
OASC promotes interoperability of systems based on the free flow of data, between cities and
within cities, by adopting a shared set of simple, widespread, open and freely available
mechanisms. This enables the development of better and more effective smart city applications
and solutions, which can reach many cities once created.
OASC is an enabler, providing a loose coupling between many systems and stakeholders. The
mechanisms of the initiative do not in deliver solutions for smart cities and communities, nor do
they constitute formal standards as developed through established standards developing
processes and organisations. OASC support reducing the gap between the slower development
processes and the need for more agile experimentation, while still being driven by actual
implementation as part of operations in cities.
OASC supports the specific development of more efficient municipal services; its primary
contribution is to support the digital transition of European cities and societies into platforms
with thriving ecosystems, enabling development of demand-driven innovative technologies and
services. OASC creates a global smart cities market by interconnecting national networks of
cities on a global level, thereby supporting the growth of European companies beyond the EU
internal market and attracting global companies and foreign investments to the EU.
3.5.2 A specific case of co-creation in IoT: SOCIOTAL
SOCIOTAL4 is a European-funded FP7 STREP project addressing the objective FP7-ICT-
2013.1.4 “A reliable, smart and secure Internet of Things for Smart Cities”. It is meant to design
key enablers for a reliable, secure and trusted environment that stimulate the creation of a
socially-aware, citizen-centric Internet of Things by encouraging people to contribute their
3 https://www.fiware.org/
4 http://sociotal.eu/
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devices and information flows. This is the typical case of co-creation – contextualized in the
smart cities application domain – where the final customers are also the users.
The platform had the target to create an environment to help people in a community to securely
pool and share data between themselves and search for solutions on a horizontal level. The
platform deals with Outsource Software Engineering where everyone may contribute and where
the viral network strengthens the connections not just between the devices, but also between the
people indifferent neighbourhoods.
By connecting both worlds, it facilitates possible way of communication and dialogue on a
horizontal level, thus giving strength to communicate ideas on a vertical level, i.e., with local
authorities. In turn, local authorities reward different projects and initiatives, by promoting IoT
(by simply demonstrating the savings in the city budget or how it taught citizens to be more
responsible, since this should all be about citizens’ initiatives and projects, not something
imposed) and encouraging ‘local heroes’ by means of practical (in kind) contribution, for
example. After all, it is up to us to determine how we take control and create new ways of life
(and work). Such a network may have the power to reshape our cities and yet it seems that it is
being built with little public knowledge. Even more so, it has huge implications on our wider
society.
Within the scope of SOCIOTAL project, the co-creation session easily guides users to create a
complete description of a new Use Case (UC). In case the UC is already described, it allows to
discover the point of view of the end user who could identify new requirements and priorities. It
is a more visual, enjoyable, and collaborative way to introduce people within the IoT and to take
advantage of all their ideas to elaborate or re-elaborate the UCs.
The materials made available allow the users to visualise abstract ideas and allow managers to
discover users’ reaction to the UC, acceptance and barriers. Co-creation allows also exploring
the availability of devices which at the end could be translated into the acceptance of a new
service or the necessity of changing technological aspects of the UC.
3.5.3 An H2020 case of co-creation: OrganiCity
OrganiCity 5provides a multidisciplinary research facility for developers of urban services, urban
data scientists, Internet of Things solution developers, urban activists, ethnographers,
sociologists, economists as well as citizens at a large scale, allowing different facets of value
creation for smarter cities and communities to be explored. Funded under the FIRE umbrella, it
combines a diverse set of urban data sources across three cities into an experimentation as a
service facility and augments these with co-creation tools.
The OrganiCity vision is to enable Smart Citizen, who not only play the role of “data producers”
by providing data about the city via participatory sensing, crowdsourcing and social networks,
but they will also play the role of “data consumer” by developing services on top of that data or
by processing datasets and annotating them to provide higher level knowledge through their
unique interpretation capabilities.
The facility provides a set of different co-creation tools that can be used by experimenters to
develop through a co-creation process smart city interventions, services and applications that
better address the citizens and city need. The experimenter can chose from the following tools:
Scenario tool – it allows user to collaboratively co-create use cases with citizens that
capture real citizen needs
Crowd sensing tools – that allows citizen to provide data through their smart phones to
co-create data feeds for the OrganiCity platform
5 http://organicity.eu/
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Opportunistic communication enablers- that allows citizen to co-create a communication
infrastructure for data collection of urban data, without the need for dedicated
infrastructure
Collaborative data annotation tools- that allows citizens to annote urban data sets with
labels or link to other information sources to co-create knowledge to better exploit urban
data
Service co-creation tools – that allow citizens to co-create simple web and mobile
services leveraging IoT infrastructure in the cities and the urban data sets.
OrganiCity provides also a co-creation methodology for experimenters and open calls to fund a
variety of co-creation experiments on top of the experimentation facility.
For their first open call, OrganiCity went as far as co-creating the open call challenges and call
text by running a series of co-creation workshops with citizens potentially interested
experimenters. The efforts paid off as nearly 130 proposals where submitted to this open call.
3.5.4 Value co-creation initiatives in the European market
In the following, a short-list of selected value co-creation initiatives is presented including
relevant initiatives for the European IoT market.
Table 2. Value co-creation initiatives relevant for the European market
Initiative Description
LEGO CUUSOO
Lego Cuusoo is an international web-based open innovation and crowdsourcing platform
that provides its customers an opportunity to create a new Lego product, build it and submit
it on Lego.cuusoo.com. Ideas supported by 10.000 votes have a chance of being selects to
become part of the LEGO portfolio and sold in LEGO stores. Customers who have their idea
chosen will earn 1% of the total net sales of the product. This experience shows a way to
engage customers, to conceive clients’ needs and to comprehend current and future trends
and market for each product.
ORANGE
Orange, a French telecommunication firm, actively participates in social networks by co-
creating applications such as the Orange TV Guide on Facebook. This application adapts TV
Guide content from Orange portals into a fun Facebook application, enabling customer
interaction with the content. Orange has opened up its R&D process to the outside world
through its web-based Livebox Lab engagement program, which provides information from
technical specifications to contacts and connections. The Lab encourages submission of B2B
partnership ideas and product proposals. The risk of sharing ‘home recipes’ with competitors
is a key concern, but the benefit of opening up access overrides it. Orange has received
many ideas through Livebox Lab and has already launched several products initiated
through this channel.
This collaboration benefits bloggers because they can access premium information for their
audiences, and it benefits Orange, as it can count on the bloggers in a crisis because they
know the company well and can acknowledge its efforts to address serious issues.
Lab'Orange of company-sponsored forums. Interaction on this web space occurs in the final
stages before a product launch, usually two to three months before the rush to market. These
interactions enable Orange to refine and validate the marketing positioning of a product
through posting and receiving comments on the forum about its products.
DEWALT
DEWALT is a leading manufacturer of high-quality power tools. Millions of professionals
rely on the company to produce the latest durable products that solve new challenges on the
worksite. To understand the direction technology and innovation need to go, DEWALT has
an award-winning insight community of more than 10,000 end users.
The company uses its community to get to know customers and their needs while gathering
product, packaging and marketing feedback. DEWALT also has an invention submission
where professional tradesmen and loyal customers submit ideas for entirely new product
lines.
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BURBERRY
A partnership between Burberry and Salesforce.com, was key in facilitating co-creation and
dialogue between corporate, employees and customers. Salesforce is a third party company,
which specializes in customer relationship management through personalized interfaces.
Burberry leveraged the suite of applications created by Salesforce to have a digital
relationship with their customers. Salesforce has been a leader in connecting companies and
the customer. The scope of co-creation is not limited to the sales and service interaction.
Customers can remotely participate in fashion shows and order items directly off the
runway. They can suggest designs for the next trench coat
DHL DHL is the world’s largest mail and logistics services company. To tackle the challenge of
improving supply chains and logistics, the company hosts hands-on workshops with
customers in Germany and Singapore. Loyal DHL customers have participated in more than
6,000 engagements, including the workshops, to co-create solutions that improve the
experience for everyone.
One of the many inventions that originated from a workshop is the Parcelcopter, a test drone
delivery service project based in Germany that could change DHL’s services forever. While
standard mail-delivery vehicles typically take half hour to deliver, the Parcelcopter only
needs eight minutes. Community members co-created the idea and tested out the potential
service, bringing their packages to what DHL is calling a “Parcelcopter Skyport.”
The business results for DHL has been phenomenal. According to Forbes, DHL’s co-
creation efforts resulted in customer satisfaction scores rising to over 80 percent, on-time
delivery performance increasing to 97 percent or higher and customer churn to decrease. It is
also a cool idea.
Based on the afore-mentioned initiatives currently in UNIFY-IoT’s radar screen, it does not take
a long time to recognize that successful IoT platforms need to be part of true ecosystems. The
ability to act as true ecosystems that facilitate value co-creation with multiple stakeholders along
the value chain and enable business models to satisfy the demands of a growing market based on
an open platform concept are of vital importance. Along these lines, the value co-creation is
about bringing together the various stakeholders in the IoT ecosystems to work towards a
mutually agreed outcome using IoT interoperable solutions and evaluate such value co-creation
by analysing the results of the projects [30].
The reference stakeholders group is identified in task T06.02 (WP6) and includes – inter alia –
partners from the research and innovation area (RIA), IoT adopters, and additional players
related to the IoT sector. While testing the waters of co-creation, these stakeholders interact
directly with one another by using common collaboration and IoT development platforms that
allow them to share their experiences and continuously cooperate in innovative and productive
efforts. By doing this, value co-creation intends to enhance the speed and scope of innovation,
generate customer-supplier B2B partnerships, fostering networking of stakeholders as well as to
enable the open source API developers' community to interact with one another and with other
IoT stakeholders.
3.6 Methodological underpinnings
The methodological approach adopted by ISMB team for conceiving the value co-creation
framework as working tool resembles the approach expected in its use. This alignment is
empathized while looking specifically at two distinctive aspects:
Co-creation approach
Iterative approach
When it comes to co-creation, while acknowledging that value co-creation is ultimately about
federating stakeholders by working together on mutually agreed joint developments (see section
3.2), ISMB team rolled-out a co-creation mechanism for designing the framework. This
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‘symphonic’ approach involved a number of actors selected due to their capacity to offer
diversified perspectives and competencies in the pursuit of a unique objective, namely advancing
(i.e., establishing a breeding ground for the next-generation of IoT solutions) and democratizing
(i.e., lowering entry barriers to sectoral comprehension and market entrance) the European IoT
ecosystem. As a result, the co-creation framework is itself a result of co-creation practices
calling upon numerous stakeholders situated in the IoT-EPI galaxy.
Regarding the iterative approach, as the value co-creation process conceived by UNIFY-IoT is
based on the rapid prototyping of self-contained, intermediate solutions that could also work as
potential starting points for alternative paths, including redefining of the initial problem (see
section 4.1), in the same vein the co-design of the value co-creation framework is the outcome of
an iterative process largely inspired by both design thinking and lean approach.
Design thinking [31] has gained recognition as an alternative approach to problem solving that
eschews simple (and simplistic) linear process of decision making, accepts indeterminacy [32]
and moves nimbly between the abstract and the concrete as well as between analysis and
synthesis in search for practical, creative resolution of problems or issues. Along these lines, the
combination of analysis (defined as the procedure by which we break down an intellectual or
substantial whole into parts or components) and synthesis (hailed as the opposite procedure,
which combines separate elements or components in order to form a coherent whole) lies in the
DNA of the specific approach leveraged for elaborating the value co-creation framework, which
recognizes that every synthesis is built upon the results of a preceding analysis, and every
analysis requires a subsequent synthesis in order to verify and correct its results [32]: while
analysis has been dominant in the exploratory analysis in which the notion of co-creation has
been subdivided into single bits and pieces to be examined through different disciplinary lenses,
synthesis has been harnessed while combining several pillars into a unique, comprehensive tool
(see section 4.1) that supports a seamless process of new product development.
The lean approach – initially popularized in manufacturing as a systematic method for the
elimination (or minimization) of waste [34] – has gained traction in the field of management,
more precisely in connection to business development. In contrast to relying on traditional
approaches that focus on developing long intricate business plans, the lean methodology favours
[34]:
Experimentation over elaborate planning.
Constant customer feedback over intuition.
Iterative design over traditional ‘big design up front’ development.
Of particular interest for value co-creation modelling is the notion of ‘lean start-up’, related to a
firm that follows a hypothesis-driven approach to test market hypotheses using a series of
‘Minimum Viable Products’ (MVP), each of which represents the smallest set of
features/activities needed to rigorously validate a concept: based on test feedback, entrepreneurs
must then decide whether to persevere with their business model, ‘pivot’ by changing some
model elements, or abandon the start-up [36]; all this happens through build-measure-learn
feedback loops [37]. As any IoT co-creation joint development is built iteratively by means of
build-measure-learn cycles – each of which improves incrementally the solution – even the co-
creation framework has undertaken a similar development: while customer feedback during
product development is integral to the lean start-up process and ensures that the producer does
not invest time designing features or services that consumers do not want, the continuous
feedback coming from contributors, testers and observers – either internal or external to the
Consortium – has allowed ISMB team to revise and incrementally improve the framework in
each iteration. Looking at months to come, activities within the scope of Task 01.02 will be
precious for further refining the framework thanks to a propelling role played by Task Forces in
the promotion of co-creation thinking.
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The results of such a methodological approach is summarized in Table 3, which recaps the main
phases of the value co-creation framework development by shedding light on the co-creation
approach (see the column “Who”, where the reader may notice a gradual expansion in the
spectrum of stakeholders involved in the co-creation process) and on the iterative logic adopted
(see column “What”, where framework development is alternated with feedback collection).
Table 3. Stages of the value co-creation framework development
Phase When Where Who What
Initial
schematization
January 2016 –
February 2016
Partner HQs ISMB Development
Internal validation February 2016
(UNIFY-IoT
Consortium
Meeting)
Nice (France) ISMB + UNIFY-IoT
Consortium
Feedback collection
Revision March 2016 – June
2016
Partner HQs ISMB Development
External validation June 2016 (IoT-EPI
Common
Workshop)
Valencia (Spain) ISMB + UNIFY-IoT
Consortium + IoT-
EPI RIAs
Feedback collection
Refinement July 2016 –
September 2016
Partner HQs ISMB Development
Launch October 2016 (IoT-
EPI Meet &
Review)
Vienna (Austria) ISMB + UNIFY-IoT
Consortium + IoT-
EPI RIAs +
European
Commission
Feedback collection
To render afore-mentioned process more robust and rigorous, the methodological approach has
duly taken into account the well-known notion of ‘triangulation’, which is seen as a prerequisite
in the attainment of validity and reliability of qualitative research. Triangulation is the
combination of (usually) three theoretical perspectives, methodological approaches, data sources,
investigators, or data analysis methods. The intent of using triangulation is to decrease, negate,
or counterbalance the deficiency of a single strategy, thereby increasing the ability to interpret
the findings [38], thus making the research rich, comprehensive and well developed.
Drawing on the various types of triangulation portrayed by the literature [39][40], two of them
have been considered as guiding lights for the development of the UNIFY-IoT value co-creation
framework:
Triangulation of analysts
Triangulation of sources
The former technique has to do with using multiple analysts to review findings or using multiple
observers and reviewers with the purpose of providing a check on selective perception and
illuminate blind spots in an interpretive analysis [40], not necessarily in an attempt to seek
consensus, but to understand multiple ways of seeing the topic.
In this context, the three fundamental analysts are as follows:
ISMB value co-creation experts, formally in charge of the development of the value-co-
creation framework.
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UNIFY-IoT contributors, responsible for complementing and validating the value-co-
creation framework in light of their respective field of expertise.
IoT-EPI experimenters (i.e., RIA consortia), ultimate beneficiaries in the position of
testing the value-co-creation framework and suggesting tweaks and pivots.
The latter technique (i.e., triangulation of sources) [41] entails the recourse to multiple sources of
evidence in data collection [42] with the intent of ensuring higher degree of trustworthiness in
findings [43].
In this context, such a principle has been operationalized by conflating three prominent data
sources:
Scrutiny of documentation (e.g., academic literature, grey literature, policy documents
published by the European Commission).
First-hand observation of artefacts and practices (e.g., business model and value
proposition sketches realized by RIAs in the context of workshops and focus groups,
sectoral practices in vogue in the IoT sector).
Primary data collection from informants (e.g., questionnaires to RIAs, mini-interviews to
participants in workshops and focus groups).
Collected inputs have been processed by means of multifarious techniques. While inputs coming
from the literature served as background for value co-creation study and framework design,
some additional comments are needed in relation to the two other sources of information.
As far as primary data from informants is concerned, questionnaires administered to RIAs
provided a rich and fine-grained picture – albeit preliminary – of how IoT-EPIs are interpreting
value co-creation. Such inputs have been examined both in at disaggregate (to know better the
single RIAs and their distinctive role into the IoT-EPI ecosystem) and aggregate level (to portray
a ‘big-picture’ in terms of adoption and intensity of use for co-creation mechanisms). A
summary of the results is provided in section 5.1.
Concerning first-hand observation of artefacts and practices, a particular effort was put in the
elaboration and systematization of artefacts jointly created by RIAs on the occasion of
workshops and focus groups. The focus honed in on two aspects, namely 1) the ease/difficulty
encountered in the usage of the co-creation framework (or part thereof), 2) the joint
developments resulting from co-creation efforts across RIAs. Apropos of this, main findings are
reported in section 5.2.
To conclude this brief section pertaining to methodological underpinnings, it is noteworthy to
remind that – by considering co-creation as a comprehensive umbrella – the framework is
consequently seen as a composite portfolio of tools, some of which have been coined from
scratch by UNIFY-IoT team (i.e., this is the case of project-specific aspects) while some others
have been selected from the literature and incorporated into the framework (i.e., this is the case
of tools recognized as reference from the community of practice). Section 4 further clarifies this
choice.
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4. THE CO-CREATION FRAMEWORK
4.1 Perspective and outline
The co-creation framework – coined by UNIFY-IoT consortium under the guidance of ISMB
team – represents the handy toolkit that the consortium has made available to RIAs, IoT-EPI
stakeholders and IoT professionals in general in order to support the co-design of IoT joint
developments involving a variety of actors that are interacting into an open innovation
ecosystem.
The toolkit embraces a design thinking [31] inspired approach aimed at a practical, creative
resolution of problems and creation of solutions, leveraging an agile mindset [44] and an
iterative modus operandi based on the rapid prototyping of self-contained, intermediate solutions
that could also work as potential starting points for alternative paths, including redefining of the
initial problem.
In designing the framework, UNIFY-IoT consortium has opted for a RIA-centric perspective.
Such a choice could be ascribed to several motivations:
UNIFY-IoT – as CSA in charge (together with BE-IoT) of IoT-EPI governance – is
ultimately meant to support RIA consortia in the comprehension of the IoT landscape6,
the analysis of gaps, the development of novel solutions and in the cultivation of
synergies that are purveyor of mutual benefits. As a result, making available to RIAs an
intuitive toolkit that reduces cognitive barriers faced in opening up the product
development process goes in this direction.
Looking specifically at the IoT-EPI ecosystem, RIAs have a propelling role in the
development of fit-for-purpose IoT solutions answering market needs. Consequently, the
prosperity of European IoT ecosystem relies on the soundness, the uptake and the
financial viability of RIA offerings.
Funded RIA projects exhibit a significant complementarity that opens up a bewildering
array of opportunity for sharing outcomes and for developing joint exploitation
roadmaps. In order to turn such opportunities into reality, value co-creation is seen as a
backbone and RIAs are considered as primary beneficiaries in the years to come.
Figure 9. Core business of IoT-EPI RIAs at a glance
6 http://www.aioti.org/resources/
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To reinforce the choice of stepping into the shoes of RIAs for conceiving the framework, a brief
compendium is provided in the following with the purpose of bringing to the fore promising
complementarities and uncover converging trajectories.
In fact, the mapping of IoT-EPI RIAs – presented by various Task Forces on the occasion of
IoT-EPI Common Workshop held in Valencia – emphasizes differences in terms of positioning
(Figure 9) as well as in relation to target users served by project value propositions (Figure 10).
Figure 10. Target users served by IoT-EPI RIAs (source: IoT-EPI TF01)
A number of promising converging trajectories – already explored in the Value Co-Creation
Workshop held in Valencia – are portrayed in the figures below. While Figure 11 is elaborated
from a technological standpoint to highlight multiple technological layers on which RIAs can
join forces (e.g., sensor level, gateway level, application level), Figure 12 looks at pilots foreseen
to distil clusters of application domains representing a fertile soil for joint endeavours and
against fragmentation.
Figure 11. Converging trajectories among RIA at technological level
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Figure 12. Converging trajectories among RIA at pilot level
That said the co-creation framework is a composite toolkit made up of four pillars, each of which
represents a building block for shaping IoT joint developments into an open innovation
ecosystem. To turn the vision expounded in section 3 into a practical supporting tool that RIAs
may use on a daily basis, the pillars – presented in clockwise order in Figure 13 (ranked by
importance, taking partially inspiration from the well-famed ‘golden circle’ [45]) – have been
selected as follows:
‘Why’ has to do with motivations driving the co-creation effort under construction.
‘What’ explains the value proposition that is offered as result of the co-creation effort.
‘Where’ situates the target market in which the value proposition is offered, taking stock
of the entire IoT ecosystem.
‘How’ examines the key decisions that involved RIAs have necessarily to consider (a.k.a.
levers) while building the joint developments.
Figure 13. Bird’s-eye-view of the UNIFY-IoT value co-creation framework
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The composite nature of the framework is reflected in the single tools that compose the overall
toolkit (Figure 14). Each selected tool – either provided by the literature or formalized by
UNIFY-IoT team – is assigned to a specific pillar in order to allow framework users to prototype
the co-created solution while taking into account several interdepended dimensions. As the
reader may surmise, the framework suggests an order for dealing with the pillars – coherently
with the clockwise order of Figure 12 – but, as the same time, allows to rework the project and to
adopt an iterative development, in tune with the lean approach [37] underpinning the entire
framework.
Figure 14. Portfolio of tools composing the UNIFY-IoT value co-creation framework
Afore-mentioned pillars and the respective tools are described in-depth in coming sections (i.e.,
4.2, 4.3, 4.4, 4.5 respectively).
4.2 Pillar 1: Why? – Value axes
Making reference to the bird’s-eye-view of Figure 12, the first pillar of the value co-creation
framework is related to ‘why’. The idea underpinning this pillar is to portray in a unique
meaningful ‘big picture’ the reasons driving the co-creation effort, i.e., the forces acting as
‘engine’ of multi-actor joint endeavours in the IoT ecosystem. The pre-eminence of this pillar is
due to the evidence that, in absence of a purpose, cause, or belief that motivates the effort, actors
do not have a driver for undertaking any action, thus making irrelevant a plethora of other
subsequent decisions.
Figure 15. Value axes in UNIFY-IoT value co-creation framework
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To operationalize this strategic vision, the adopted toolkit draws on UNIFY-IoT value axes (i.e.,
monetization, adoption, societal awareness and acceptance, dealt with respectively in WP2, WP3
and WP4) to shape a three-pronged diagram in which each axis is seen as a checkbox that
includes a variety of not mutually-exclusive tags meant to describe the motivations of the co-
creation effort making reference specifically to a given axis (Figure 15).
The approaches adopted and the resulting taxonomies are described separately for each value
axis (section 4.2.1, 4.2.2, 0), while Figure 16 offers a preview of the ‘aggregate’ taxonomy.
Figure 16. Value axes taxonomy
4.2.1 Value axis A - Monetization
As clarified in D02.01, IoT ecosystems offer composite solutions comprising of large
heterogeneous systems of systems beyond an IoT platform and solve important technical
challenges in the different industrial verticals and across verticals.
When it comes to monetization, a new approach is required to create (i.e., perform activities that
increase the value of a company’s offering and encourage customer willingness to pay) and
capture (i.e., appropriate customer value, turning into revenue) value7 in the IoT ecosystems
(Figure 17).
As pointed out in D02.01, making money in the connected space is not limited to physical
product sales: other revenue streams become possible after the initial product sale, including
value-added services, subscriptions, and apps, which can easily exceed the initial purchase price.
Figure 17 describes how value can be created in the context of IoT ecosystem and the actual
transition from (virtual) value into money has to be done by the application of a respective
business model.
While several known business models from the software industry can be applied (e.g., freemium
models), also complete new models arise by the combination of hardware and software aspects,
such as the sensor-as-as-service model. In D02.01 this aspect has been elaborated in detail.
7 https://hbr.org/2014/07/how-the-internet-of-things-changes-business-models
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Figure 17. IoT mindset shift (source: Smart Design)
Taking into account the diversified landscape that could be observed, an interesting example in
this vein mentioned in D02.01 shows a three-pronged business model that appears as a common
thread running through a cohort of telco operators examined by ISMB team on a global scale
(Table 4): here the three families of offerings (i.e., connectivity-related offerings, additional
technological IoT offerings, complementary offerings), their underlying rationale and the
monetization logic can be considered as framework for characterizing the role of network
operators in fostering IoT ecosystems.
Table 4. Three-pronged business model in telco sector
Type Connectivity-related
offerings
Additional technological IoT
offerings
Complementary
offerings
Rationale
underlying the
business line
Core business
Vertical integration (combination in
one firm of two or more stages of the
value chain normally operated by
separate firms) and/or horizontal
integration (acquisition of additional
business activities that are at the same
level of the value chain in multiple
industries)
Functional integration
Type of revenue
stream Basic revenue stream
Revenue stream taking the lion’s
share in terms of ‘weight’
Additional revenue
stream
Monetization
logic
Tariffs charged depending
on volume of traffic and
number of connections
Recurring fees for accessing IoT
functionalities in ‘as a service’
fashion
Consulting fees on a
project basis
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Going beyond telco operators, while D02.01 presents a business model taxonomy as well as a
compendium of business model families, the present deliverable draws on such a body of
knowledge to suggest a succinct taxonomy related to value capturing.
This aspect, in fact, is associated to the revenue model encompassed in the ‘magic triangle’[47]
used as reference in D02.01, thus becoming the cornerstone of monetization value axis.
The taxonomy – taken from a study on the data economy published by ISMB team – identifies
the following monetization logics8, which could steer the subsequent stages in the co-design of
the joint development:
Premium – à la carte
Premium – subscription fee
Premium – royalties
Freemium – featured limited
Freemium – time limited
Freemium – size limited
Free – advertising powered
Free – cross-subsidization
Free – zero marginal cost
Figure 18 depicts the taxonomy as initially presented in the guise of a checkbox template in the
study conducted by ISMB team.
Figure 18. Monetization taxonomy
4.2.2 Value axis B - Adoption
WP3 as a whole aims to understand the prominent enablers/inhibitors for the adoption of IoT
platforms and to propose strategies to maximize engagement and uptake of IoT solutions
resulting from the IoT-EPI program. By doing so, the notion of innovation diffusion becomes a
pivotal pillar of the analysis in an attempt to explain – drawing also on empirical findings
stemming from the platform overview (D03.01) – how, why, and at what rate new IoT
technologies spread.
When it comes to the adoption of innovation, there are copious perspectives for looking at,
understanding, and unpacking its inherent complexity: in fact, owing to the interrelationship of
8 https://www.w3.org/2012/06/pmod/pmod2012_submission_16.pdf
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social and technical factors [48] influencing adoption phenomena, a variety of features are used
to characterize the adoption of a technology (Figure 20).
Figure 19. Approaches and features for looking at innovation adoptions
For instance, Tornatzky and Fleischer [49] combine two different reference points, namely the
technology and the carrier. The authors describe six stages of technology innovation: research,
development, deployment, adoption, implementation, and routinization. Subsequently, Tornatzky
and Fleischer group these six stages by decoupling the ones carried out by technology producers
from the ones performed by technology users: research, development, and deployment are dealt
with by technology producers, while adoption, implementation, and routinization are performed
by users.
Rogers [48], for his part, highlights five features that affect the adoption of technology:
compatibility (i.e., the degree to which an innovation is perceived as being consistent with the
existing values, past experiences, and needs of potential adopters), complexity (i.e., the degree to
which an innovation is perceived as difficult to understand and use), observability (i.e., the
degree to which the results of an innovation are visible to others), relative advantage (i.e., the
degree to which an innovation is perceived as better than the idea it supersedes), trialability (i.e.,
the degree to which an innovation may be experimented with on a limited basis). Among the
features identified by Rogers, Tornatzky and Klein [51] focus their attention on compatibility,
complexity, and relative advantage. According to these scholars, these features are those that
have the greatest impact on the decision of adopting a technology. As the authors continue to
reflect on these features, they stress on the positive or negative effects they have on the final
adoption of a new technology. While compatibility and relative advantage can have positive
effects, the complexity on using a technology is having a rather negative influence on the long-
term adoption of it.
However, features and reasons of adoption include the technology itself, the producers, the users,
and the context as well. For instance, Merete and Sørensen [52] talk about domestication in
respect to the way that technology is incorporated into everyday life and implies the way that an
innovation is becoming familiar. In this frame of discussion, the adoption of an innovation is not
flying solo. Rather, adopting a technology is a collective and collaborative activity [53].
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The different dynamics that converge towards the adoption of an innovation make the discussion
fairly complicated and relevant focusing on the criteria of IoT solutions for stimulating the
adoption of such kind of innovation. Hence, for stimulating the adoption of an IoT solutions
providers should look at the different implications that their solution can have in respect to other
technologies; how it can be used and adopted, perhaps integrated, by users for enhancing the
everyday life; when and how a platform is allowing collective activities.
That said, for the sake of the co-creation framework, the present deliverable reflects the choice of
taking primarily inspiration from the seminal work conducted by Everett Rogers.
While assuming that innovation diffusion occurs time-wise through a five-step decision-making
process (i.e., knowledge, persuasion, decision, implementation, and confirmation), Rogers turned
the inherent heterogeneity of consumer behaviours into adopted categories, intended as a
classification of individuals within a social system on the basis of innovativeness. As part of this
theorization, Rogers suggests a total of five categories of adopters in order to standardize the
usage of adopter categories in diffusion research.
In terms of motivation – acknowledging that value axes are part of the ‘why’ pillar – the co-
creation framework proposes a taxonomy based on categories of adopters portrayed by Rogers,
intended in the context of this study as the innovation adoption targeted by the joint
development:
Innovators
Early adopters
Early majority
Late majority
Laggards
In other words, this axis may help stakeholders involved in the co-creation process to be aware
of the target diffusion estimated for the joint development: consequently, the target could span
from niche market applications only for affluent innovators whose risk tolerance allows them to
rapidly adopt advanced technologies, to mass market applications that aspire to conquer a market
share nearing the saturation, thus reaching also individuals that exhibit an ingrained aversion to
change-agents.
Figure 20. Categories of adopters situated along the product adoption curve
For the sake of clarity, the five target categories lying at the core of the taxonomy elaborated for
this value axis are visualized in Figure 20: the figure highlights such innovation categories
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against the product adoption curve (which follows the well-known S-shaped curve if plotted on a
cumulative basis over time [54]).
4.2.3 Value axis C - Societal awareness and acceptance
Task T04.01 – culminated in the release of D04.01 – has been framed around the role of societal
awareness and acceptance of IoT with the intent to set solid foundation for the promotion of IoT
towards adopters, end users, futures developers, public sector and society at large.
It goes without saying that societal awareness and acceptance are vital aspects to be
painstakingly taken into consideration by IoT stakeholders in order to build successful products,
services and applications. It is also important to highlight that the more end users are using a
technology, the more they clearly identify the possible negative impacts of such applications and
services dealing with their individual and human values. Thus, there is a need to involve users in
the definition and development of innovative IoT solutions to take into account their experience
(user’s feedback), understand what they accept and their concerns.
It is therefore important to include them in the process of requirements definition, as services and
applications could imply several potential issues in terms of security, privacy, hyper-
connectivity, loose of human interaction, etc. which may not have been foreseen and anticipated
by technological developers.
Taking into account several complementary perspective, D04.01 provided results of a survey
administered to RIA consortia to understand the major barriers to successful ecosystem adoption
as well as a compendium of barriers faced by developers in adopting platform ecosystem.
Expanding the scope of the analysis, D04.01 distilled also barriers in the adoption of IoT
solutions faced by businesses and consumers. Looking at societal challenges at large, D04.01
investigated into phenomena such as lack of trust, need for adapted regulation and legislation,
lack of digital skills and competencies and market immaturity.
When it comes to taking a positive perspective, placing the spotlight on factors that positively
influence societal acceptance of IoT in lieu of barriers hampering such acceptance, D04.01
distilled five main drivers of acceptance.
These drivers are:
Functional value (i.e., immediate usefulness perceived by the user), social value (i.e.,
influence of relevant others on the single user),
Epistemic value: (i.e., capability of the product to incentive learning or curiosity in the
user), emotional value (i.e., emotions the product transmits to the user, such as happiness,
pleasure etc.)
Conditional value (i.e., context in which the product is actually used, so the time, the
place and the people with whom the user interacts while using the product).
Along these lines, the present co-creation framework proposes a taxonomy of criteria underlying
the societal acceptance of IoT technologies inspired by the ’30 elements of value’ coined by
Bain9:
Functional
Emotional
Life changing
Societal impact
9 https://hbr.org/2016/09/the-elements-of-value
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The comprehensive list of the ’30 elements of value’ is visualized in Figure 21.
Figure 21. Criteria underlying the societal acceptance presented in the context of the ‘30 elements of value’
(source: Bain)
4.3 Pillar 2: What? – Value proposition
The aim of the present pillar is to formalize ‘what’ each joint development (and, in a more fine-
grained way, each RIAs) is offering to target segments (i.e., ‘adopters’ in the UNIFY-IoT jargon)
with the purpose of creating value along the dimensions previously outlined in pillar 1.
The value proposition offered by each joint development is decoupled in two elements: the
technological value proposition and the facilitation and supporting measures. While the first one
is made up of technological features that will remain available once the grant period is over –
being the cornerstone of the RIAs’ sustainability strategy – the second one concern actions put in
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place during the period covered by the EU funding in order to foster community establishment
and to accelerate the uptake of the technological solutions.
According to UNIFY-IoT framework, the technological value proposition encompasses the
following technical features or any combination of them:
Open APIs
Software components ready to be installed on-premises
Fit-for-purpose services
Mobile applications
Web applications
Platforms or systems
With the aim of favouring the observability and trialability [48] of these features – resulting in
awareness of and interest in the proposed solutions – RIAs may roll-out facilitation and
supporting measures framed around the following measures, which could be combined into
composite initiatives:
Coaching and mentoring
Business incubation/acceleration
Networking and brokerage
Tutorials, user manuals, etc.
Provision of computing infrastructure as a service
Hackathons
This two-fold value proposition is offered to target segments of adopters, which have been
classified by UNIFY-IoT as follows:
Start-ups
SMEs
Large enterprises
Makers
Universities and research bodies
Students
NGOs
Public sector entities
The extent to which value propositions offered by RIAs achieve problem-solution fit with
respect to target users is examined by means of the Value Proposition Canvas [55].
This tool is part of a methodological portfolio that is frequently credited for being the standard
de facto in the design of mechanisms for value creation and value appropriation.
Such a portfolio encompasses two interrelated tools having a complementary nature: while the
Value Proposition Canvas is meant to investigate the problem-solution fit by shaping an offering
that meets what customers actually want, the Business Model Canvas [56] deals with the
product-market fit by portraying the business logic adopted by a company.
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As a result, while the Value Proposition Canvas has to do with value generation for customers,
the Business Model Canvas regard value generation for the company (Figure 22).
When it comes to UNIFY-IoT, the Value Proposition Canvas – besides being part of the value-
co-creation framework – regularly serves as working tools during workshops with RIAs in order
to elicit requirements and prototype joint developments accordingly (see section 5.2 for
examples in this vein); Business Model Canvas, for its part, is used by TF04 participants as
working tool for sketching out possible exploitation avenues on the occasion of coaching
workshops with RIAs.
Figure 22. Value Proposition Canvas and Business Model Canvas
The Value Proposition Canvas is a tool that creates a simple and shared language based on visual
thinking in order to discuss value propositions across organisational and entrepreneurial
boundaries. It has two sides (Figure 23).
Firstly, with the Customer Profile, organizations can better clarify their understanding around the
costumer in a structured and detailed manner (‘what we observe’).
The second side of the Value Proposition Canvas is the Value Map, which describes the features
of a specific value proposition made available by the company (‘what we design’) to answer the
needs exhibited by customer segments under the spotlight.
Figure 23. The Value Proposition Canvas at a glance
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The customer profile description in the Value Proposition Canvas is divided into three sections,
namely, the Customer Jobs, Customer Gains and Customer Pains, which are explained in Figure
24.
Figure 24. Role of the Customer Profile in the Value Proposition Canvas
The Value Map is composed of three elements: Products & Services, Pain Relievers and Gain
Creators, whose role is clarified in Figure 25.
Figure 25. Role of the Value Map in the Value Proposition Canvas
In case the value co-creation process occurs in a decentralized manner, thus involving several
actors working remotely, Value Proposition Canvases – as well as the Business Model Canvases,
if needed – could be concurrently edited in a cloud-based co-design environment called
Strategyzer10, which could be seen as a Web component of the proposed toolkit.
4.4 Pillar 3: Where? – Value network
The purpose of this pillar is to contextualize the offering outlined in pillar 2 into the wide-
ranging IoT ecosystem, which is made up of a variety of interdependent market arenas.
Consequently, technological value propositions offered by each RIA are positioned along an
existing schema of the IoT value chain while a subsequent mapping of the resulting value
network is schematized in order to bring to the fore the novel value exchanges ushered-in by
value co-creation practices.
10 https://strategyzer.com/
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The value chain concept is based on the Porter's theorization [57], according to which all the
activities that organisations carry out are divided into primary activities and secondary activities.
All activities have costs and successful businesses organize and carry out their activities in such
a way that value is added. It is the value added that allows revenues to exceed costs so that
profits are made. To add value, the organisation must provide value added to its customers,
otherwise customers would presumably carry out the activities themselves. The customers either
cannot carry out the activities at all, cannot match costs, or choose not to carry on the activities
and are willing to pay others to carry them out instead. Example of type of activities are
presented below:
Know-how – Suppliers often use know-how that customers simply do not have.
Economies of scale – Suppliers often produce efficiently in huge volumes with each
customer buying only a small proportion. Suppliers’ economies of scale simply cannot be
replicated by each end-user/customer.
Risk – Suppliers might shoulder production risks that end-users/customers do not want.
Location – Suppliers might be in a low-cost area while end-users/customers are in a high-
cost area.
Flexibility – Suppliers generate variable costs, while doing it yourself usually may entail
prohibitive fixed costs.
The idea behind the model is that a product or service is passed from one discrete organizational
unit to the next, each one adding value. The organizational units can be within an organization as
well as between organizations. An important element is that there is no feedback. A product
moves through the chain in a unidirectional way.
Increasing digitization of businesses results in their value chains being more multi-dimensional
and more complex. Several drivers such as advances in social, mobile, information processing,
data analytics, cloud and IoT, influenced the digitization trend. The consequences of these
developments are the emergence of the notion of value network [58]. This value configuration –
in antithesis to the afore-mentioned value chain underlying the transformation of physical inputs
into outputs through long-linked technologies [59] – is about connecting actors via mediating
technologies enabling parallel and simultaneous interactions (Table 5).
Table 5. Difference between value chain and value network (from Stabell & Fjeldstad [58])
Value configuration Value chain Value network
Value creation logic Transformation of inputs into
products
Linking actors
Primary technology Long-linked Mediating
Primary activities Inbound logistics, operations,
outbound logistics, marketing,
service
Network promotion and contract
management, service provisioning,
infrastructure operation
Interactivity relationship logic Sequential Simultaneous, parallel
Primary activity interdependence Sequential Reciprocal
Value system structure Interlinked chains Layered and interconnected
networks
A value network could thus be defined as a value creating system in which all involved
stakeholders’ co-produce value [60]. The consequence of value networks is the co-production of
value between stakeholders.
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Studies indicate that many providers seek to grow beyond their core product business by
developing ancillary service offerings. The providers may exploit untapped markets; become
strategic partners to their customers, and even out the cyclicality of revenues. Value is delivered
through co-creation between the firm, the customer and various networks [61].
The actual co-creation begins with an identification of needs and the goal for the exchange. The
diagnosis typically requires professional involvement. An inexperienced customer has to rely on
supplier to propose the diagnosis and to elucidate needs, budget, schedule, usage, and business
context, but may involve external consultants to balance the asymmetry. Mapping customer
processes, supplier processes and interaction processes to identify co-creation opportunities is
part of the diagnosis. Requirement definition involves getting insight into business model,
operating process, as well as specific needs and problems [62][63].
How value is co-created in the interplay of relationships between actors collaborating to develop
solutions is largely unexplored. Different approaches explore how actors integrate resources in
interaction to develop integrated solutions, and identify the related benefits and sacrifices
perceived by each actor in two different solution networks: a knowledge intensive service
solution, and an industrial service solution that is a product-service bundle. The theoretical point
of departure for the study [64]. was that interaction and resource integration between actors is the
primary characteristic of business, and the creation of benefits valued by actors necessarily
involves two or several counterparts. The study described how value co-creation occurs in the
interplay of actors, resources and activities in solution networks, and demonstrated that the value
processes a) within individual customer or supplier organizations, b) between the co-operating
suppliers, and c) between the customers and their solution suppliers are iterative and inherently
interlinked. This study was among the first empirical studies to combine the perspectives of
value co-creation and the interaction and network approach. The study indicates that customer
perceived value was affected by resource integration and interaction processes between
suppliers: in the studied cases, relationship bonds and activity links between suppliers were
reflected on the customer experience of the solution process and the extent of the resource
constellation. The findings show that not all customers feel that integrated solutions offer
sufficient benefits, and a solution's value potential may depend on customer resources. Solution
suppliers should therefore develop means of identifying customers with a greater tendency to
acquire broader solutions, gain an understanding of the customer's value processes, and develop
resource constellations and activities accordingly. It is recommended for the suppliers to develop
methods and metrics for calculating and pricing the value of coordination and integration work,
and make it visible to their customers [64].
Figure 26. IoT value chain (source: Telecom Circle)
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In the field of IoT, value network has been hailed for a long time as dominant framework among
practitioners (see for illustrative purposes the version proposed by Telecom Circle11 in Figure
26).
Making a step forward, value network has gradually gained recognition in the IoT area taking
into account the coexistence of several interacting value chains (Figure 27, recently formulated
by ISMB team as part of a consulting activity).
Sensor /
endpoint
supplier
Network
operator
M2M
product
supplier
System
integrator
(Vertical)
Service
provider
Nth-level
provider
Data
transmission
provider
Vertical
application
domain #1
Sensor /
endpoint
supplier
Network
operator
M2M
product
supplier
System
integrator
(Vertical)
Service
provider
Nth-level
provider
Data
transmission
provider
Vertical
application
domain #2
Sensor /
endpoint
supplier
Network
operator
M2M
product
supplier
System
integrator
(Vertical)
Service
provider
Nth-level
provider
Data
transmission
provider
Vertical
application
domain #n
Degree of vertical integration
De
gre
e o
f ho
rizo
nta
l inte
gra
tion
Degree of functional integration
Cloud provider
R&D advisor
SW developer
Value network transition
Figure 27. Transition from value chain to value network in the IoT area (source: ISMB)
11 http://www.telecomcircle.com/2016/05/internet-of-things-business-models/
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When several enabling roles into the value network are covered by a unique player – due to
vertical, horizontal or functional integration – such a player could be intuitively seen as a
platform (Figure 27). The benefits of platforms are scalability, speed and their capacity to build
on network effects. The IoT platforms can support the development of demand-driven value
networks forming a business environment holistically designed to maximize value of and
optimize risk across the set of extended value chain processes and technologies that senses and
orchestrates demand based on a near-zero-latency demand signal across multiple networks of
corporate stakeholders and trading partners12.
To make actionable the notion of value network in the context of value co-creation, various
formalisms can be adopted to map the value network that gravitates around the joint
development. Short-listed formalisms – which could be dynamically added to the framework
toolkit – are e3-value [65], VNA [66] and Board of Innovation13.
Such formalisms – known in the business model literature with the moniker of ‘ontologies’ [67]
– take a value-centric perspective since they consider the entire value network as unit of analysis,
mapping transactions and value exchanges occurring among actors located in the ecosystem
(Figure 28).
e3-value VNA Board of Innovation
Figure 28. Short-listed formalisms for value network mapping
Finally, Table 6 provides a benchmark of afore-mentioned formalisms.
Table 6. Benchmark of short-listed formalisms for value network mapping
Name Academic
coverage
Usage among
practitioners
Qualitative/
Quantitative
Software
tool
Off-line tool
e3-value Medium Low Qualitative +
Quantitative
Yes No
VNA Medium Low Qualitative +
Quantitative
Yes No
Board of
Innovation
Low Medium Qualitative No Yes
4.5 Pillar 4: How? – Mechanisms for value co-creation
The present pillar consists in a collection of mechanisms of value co-creation, each of which is
intended as a choice (thus ‘lever’) that a RIA consortia have to take in consideration while
12 http://www.gartner.com/it-glossary/demand-driven-value-network-ddvn
13 http://www.boardofinnovation.com/innovation-tools
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designing joint undertakings – aligned with missions and motivations (pillar 1) – able to deliver
the value proposition (pillar 2) in a specified positioning of IoT ecosystem (pillar 3). The
combination of such choices shapes the value configuration and the organizational model of
RIAs as well as their prominent touchpoints with other actors situated in the IoT ecosystem.
Table 7 summarizes the mechanisms of value co-creation that UNIFY-IoT has selected – in
concert with RIAs – and modelled with the intent of supporting strategic decisions of
organizations and groups willing to the test the waters of value co-creation in the IoT realm.
Table 7. Value co-creation mechanisms
Mechanism of value co-creation Options
External access to the platform Everyone can join it (e.g., Open API) vs. selection process (e.g.,
registration, paywall) [68]
Network leadership in collaboration Centralized (e.g., orchestration and coordination of the RIA
platform) vs. diffused (neutral nature of the RIA) [69]
Adoption of open standard Yes vs. no14
Open data licenses Copyleft (e.g., Creative Commons) vs. Copyright15
Open source licenses Yes (e.g., Apache-2.0, GPL, LGPL, MIT) vs. no16
Use of platforms to distribute project code Yes (e.g., SourceForge, GitHub) vs. no17
Use of third-party’s catalogues / marketplaces
to distribute project results
Yes (e.g., openplatforms.eu, FIWARE) vs. no
Interoperability with other IoT-EPI projects Yes (i.e., ‘one-stop-shopping’ approach) vs. no (i.e., ‘best of
breed’ approach)
Recourse to co-creation catalysers Yes (e.g., open calls, hackatons, rapid prototyping involving end-
users) vs. no
Liaisons with educational/research bodies Yes vs. no
Use of MOOC platforms to disseminate
educational materials
Yes (e.g., open education platforms) vs. no
Involvement in the policy-related debate (e.g.,
trust, data protection)
Yes (e.g., AIOTI WG4) vs. no
14 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard
15 http://opendefinition.org/
16 https://opensource.org/licenses/category
17 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_source_code_hosting_facilities
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5. INPUT COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS
5.1 UNIFY-IoT value co-creation questionnaire
Within the context of the IoT-European Platforms Initiative, the UNIFY-IoT project created a set
of questionnaires addressing issues related to the development and adoption of IoT technologies
and applications. Questionnaires have been shaped based on UNIFY-IoT knowledge about the
topic and the involved participants to gather information on six highly important topics in the
very fragmented IoT landscape, namely business models, standardization, value co-creation,
platform adoption and community engagement, external partnerships best practices, educational
platforms and factors of acceptance of the IoT.
Questionnaires were of great help to UNIFY-IoT in order to assess the IoT environment and
landscape as a key pillar for the development of the future connected Digital Single Market and
to evaluate the IoT technologies and applications and their role in creating economic
opportunities, innovation and deployments as part of the digital/Internet economy.
In this section, the IoT value co-creation framework questionnaire proposed by WP01 is
presented, together with its corresponding results.
5.1.1 Questionnaire structure
The aim of this questionnaire was to capture the overview of the value proposition of the IoT
projects to aid in the definition of the comprehensive cocreation framework presented in this
deliverable to support IoT partners in the creation of new business opportunities. Within the
questionnaire, value cocreation is defined as a strategy, which brings together different IoT
ecosystem stakeholders focusing on IoT applications, customers experience and mutual
relationships. This strategy allows and encourages stakeholders (i.e., companies supply/demand,
group(s) of customers, end users, etc.) to be actively involved and jointly produce a mutually
valued outcome and create a value rich experience.
Appendix I collects the complete questionnaire sent to the IoT-EPI projects and participating
organizations related to IoT value co-creation. The questionnaire is divided in three parts, each
of which is devoted to a vital topic for the definition of the value co-creation framework
presented in this deliverable.
Part I: IoT value proposition to gain insights related to the IoT-EPI projects’ value
proposition.
Part II: IoT value co-creation, to understand to which level value co-creation approaches
and mechanisms were being used both within the partner organizations and within the
IoT-EPI projects.
Part III: IoT adoption, to discover to which extent IoT-EPI results are intended to be
exploited by the partner organizations in the projects consortia.
As can be inferred from the previously described questionnaire structure, two target ‘levels’ were
considered for formulating the questions: the project level and the organization (partner) level.
The organization (partner) level aims to identify the degree of familiarity of partners of the
different consortia with co-creation approaches and mechanisms, while the project level aims to
identify to which depth, knowledge in this subject is being extrapolated and implemented within
the IoT-EPI projects.
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5.1.2 Results
In the following, some of the most important results from the questionnaire on IoT value co-
creation are presented and analysed.
Part I: Value Proposition
Most IoT-EPI projects (59%) reported as tangible outcomes the release of Open APIs.
Additionally, , projects also listed other tangible outcomes such as the realization/release of: IoT
Hackathons, IoT/Hardware incubators, use cases, an Irish Center for Commercialization, Open
Access Maker Space, IoT focused co-working space, hardware accelerator, IoT hardware, IoT
security, privacy, trust specifications and modules, ontologies, IoT middleware, interoperability
mechanisms, and a modular open source IoT gateway (HW & SW).
No evidence of tangible outcomes such as mobile/web applications, services or SW components
ready for installation was reflected in the questionnaires.
Figure 29. Tangible outcomes foreseen by the IoT-EPI projects
Regarding the Open APIs and other pieces of code expected to be released by the projects, as
shown in Figure 30, the majority of them (80%) declared to have foreseen their release as open
source, preferring the Apache 2.0 license (35%), followed by the GPL and EUPL licenses (12%
each). Further details are provided in Figure 31.
Figure 30. Code and/or Open APIs released as Open Source
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Figure 31. Open source licenses selected by the IoT-EPI Projects
Part II: IoT Value Co-creation
The 68% of the questioned sample declared to have implemented a ‘technology push’ approach
(68%) within the IoT-EPI projects, while only the 27% declared to follow an ‘application pull’
approach regarding the type of value creation their project is implementing (see Figure 32).
Figure 32. Type of value creation approach being implemented in IoT-EPI projects
At an organization level (Figure 33), several questions were posed to identify the familiarity with
co-creation approaches. The majority of the organizations (45%) declared to already use value
co-creation approaches/mechanisms as innovation drivers, although a large share of the sample
(35%) declared not to used them, and another 20% did not provided an answer.
Figure 33. Use of value co-creation mechanisms and/or approaches within organizations as innovation drivers
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Most organizations (40%) declared not having a defined framework (methodology, platforms,
etc.) for value co-creation,, while 35% of the sample declared to have already defined it (Figure
34). Once more, a large share of the interviewed sample (25%) did not provide an answer,
possibly because the question does not apply to their organizations or simply due to the lack of
familiarity with the value co-creation concepts.
Figure 34. Value co-creation framework already defined within the organization
Regarding the value co-creation methodologies being implemented within the organizations (see
Figure 35), 31% of the sample declared to use rapid prototyping involving final users/relevant
stakeholders, 21% declared to implement a collaborative design approach, while a 10%
implemented the collaborative approach in the ‘making’ and a 10% in ‘hackathons’.
Among others, 7% declared to use virtual product/service launch while and 14% declared that
none of the mechanisms mentioned above has been implemented at organization level.
Figure 35. Value co-creation methodologies being implemented within the organizations
At a project level, 55% of the sample declared that their projects were implementing value co-
creation mechanisms or approaches as innovation drivers (in comparison with the 45% at
organization level), while 30% declared their projects are not using them at all and a 15% did not
answered the question (see Figure 36)
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Figure 36. Use of value co-creation mechanisms and/or approaches within IoT-EPI projects as innovation
drivers
Regarding the value co-creation methodologies being implemented within the IoT-EPI projects
(see Figure 37), 32% of the sample declared to use rapid prototyping involving final
users/relevant stakeholders, 29% declared to implement a collaborative design approach, while a
13% implemented the collaborative approach in the ‘making’ and a 16% in ‘hackathons’.
Finally, a 10% declared to use virtual product/service launch. Surprisingly, all questionnaires
provided an answer, which in comparison with the 30% that declared that no value co-creation
methodologies were being used within IoT-EPI projects, could imply that organizations are using
value co-creation methodologies and approaches without been aware of it.
Figure 37. Value co-creation methodologies being used in IoT-EPI projects
When participants in the survey were asked which mechanisms for value co-creation do they
considered appropriate for implementation among IoT projects, preference was given to
collaborative approaches during the design phase (35%) and the making (26%), while the virtual
product/service launch and the collaborative hackathon obtained the 23% and the 16%
respectively (see Figure 38)
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Figure 38. Value co-creation methodologies that could be implemented among IoT projects
Part III: IoT Adoption
Within this part of the questionnaire, the first objective was to identify the target stakeholders at
both organization and project level. At organization level, mostly SMEs (19%), startups (17%),
universities and research bodies (15%) and large enterprises (13%) were identified as
stakeholders targeted to exploit IoT project results (see Figure 39).
Figure 39. Stakeholders targeted by your organization to exploit IoT project results
However, when asked to identify the three (3) most relevant stakeholders among these, the
majority listed as such: SMEs (with a 35%), startups (with a 20%) and both the public sector and
the universities and research bodies (with 15% each). Surprisingly, large enterprises were not
indicated as one of the most relevant stakeholders (0%) as shown in Figure 40.
Figure 40. Most relevant stakeholders targeted by organization to exploit IoT project results
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At project level, identified stakeholders that directly use the overall project results were SMEs
(24%), universities and research bodies (16%), startups (15%), makers (13%), public sector
entities (12%) followed by large enterprises (8%) among others (see Figure 41).
Figure 41. Stakeholders directly leveraging IoT project results
Addittional information derived from the questionnaires refers to the level of adoption of the
outcomes of the project. The 80% of participants replied positivelly when questioned if they
were planning to implement or use any instruments and/or tools for measuring the adoption of
projects outcomes. However, when asked to explain how they were planning to use these
instruments and tools most participants did not provide any answer. Only few participants
specified that this would be measured in terms of success of the funded start-ups and their
feedback on the results, or simply through user surveys.
5.2 Value co-creation workshop with IoT-EPI projects
5.2.1 Overview
During the IoT-EPI Common Workshop held in Valencia, Spain during June 2016, UNIFY-IoT
organized a hands-on value co-creation workshop to which all IoT-EPI projects were invited.
Within the workshop, the concept of value co-creation was intended – coherently with the
definition reported in section 3.2 – as an approach that could bring together stakeholders to work
towards mutually agreed joint developments having various natures (e.g., technical solutions,
joint pilots, commercial exploitation roadmaps, community building, educational initiatives)[70].
In terms of scope the workshop focused on the value co-creation that can occur within RIAs and
among RIAs where common opportunities/challenges are identified, but also leveraging
outcomes of previous/running FP7 IoT projects.
The workshop kicked-off with a brief presentation of the value co-creation framework and the
links with IoT-EPI TFs defined by UNIFY-IoT and BE-IoT project. Then, some basic concepts
linked to value co-creation were explained, including the use of the Value Proposition Canvas.
Subsequently, a value co-creation exercise was proposed and explained to the attendants, who
were grouped in three teams. By doing this, besides kick starting the co-creation thinking amid
RIAs, UNIFY-IoT had the chance to test for the first time the value co-creation framework with
stakeholders external to the Consortium (Table 3).
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Figure 42. Value co-creation workshop during the IoT-EPI meeting in Valencia, Spain
Within each group, each participant presented itself and described briefly the represented IoT-
EPI project. After this initial ‘ice-breaking’ phase, a brainstorming session to identify possible
joint developments among projects took place. By the end of this phase, each team had identified
a 2/3 joint developments of mutual interest. To conclude, one of these identified joint
developments was selected by the participants for further analysis. In the interest of time, not all
the tools encompassed in the framework were tested and RIA participants worked on the
prototyping of a an initial value proposition sketch using the Value Proposition Canvas.
A list of the participants, the facilitators, and the composition of the three groups formed to
perform the value co-creation exercise is available in Appendix II.
5.2.2 Value co-creation exercise structure
The proposed exercise was structure in 3 phases, as described in the following:
Phase 0: Projects’ assets
• Goal: break the ice and identify useful IoT-EPI projects’ assets for the joint developments
• Format: brainstorming session
• Timing: 10 minutes
• Expected outcomes: a list of tangible assets each project could bring in to the table for the
realization of joint developments
Phase 1: Joint developments
• Goal: stimulate and validate joint developments combining multiple RIAs’ outcomes.
• Format: brainstorming sessions
• Timing: 20 minutes
• Expected outcomes: 2-3 prioritized joint developments, previously validated on the bases
of mutual benefits (RIAs’ perspective), market traction (adopters’ perspective) and
societal relevance (end-users’ perspective)
Phase 3: Value proposition exercise
• Goal: build a sound value proposition for the selected joint development
• Format: brainstorming to fill-in the Value Proposition Canvas for the selected joint
development
• Timing: 20 minutes
• Expected outcomes: initially defined value proposition for the selected joint development
5.2.3 Results from the value co-creation workshop
In this section, results from the three groups formed during the value co-creation workshop will
be presented.
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5.2.3.1 Group 1
Facilitators
Maria Teresa Delgado (ISMB) and Veronica Barchetti (HIT)
Involved projects
BIG IoT, InterIoT, VICINITY, bIoTope
Summary
The exercise started with a brief presentation of the involved projects where each project
representative tried to describe in a simple and clear way each project’s tangible assets. This lead
to the identification of an assets set that would be the starting point to identify possible joint
developments among projects. Figure 43 shows the post-its collected during the workshop with
relevant inputs, which are gathered and classified in Table 8.
Figure 43. Projects’ assets from Group 1
Table 8. Identified assets and corresponding IoT-EPI
project (Group 1)
Identified Asset Project
B2B Marketplace BigIoT
Case Tool to support interoperability
InterIoT
Common APIs BigIoT
M2M for integration Healthcare, Waste Management and City Traffic
bIoTope
Meta-middleware InterIoT
Open APIs InterIoT
VICINITY Gateway VICINITY
Virtual Gateway InterIoT
After completing the initial part of the exercise and having collected the possible assets that each
project could bring in for the development of joint endeavours, the next phase consisted of a
brainstorming aimed at identifying such possible joint developments.
Possible identified developments were again collected using post-its to facilitate and further
promote the discussion, as shown in Figure 44.
Figure 44. Initial set of identified joint developments among IoT-EPI projects
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The identified joint developments were mainly focused on the following subjects:
Open calls, to capture data and for use case exploitation.
Collaborative requirements elicitation, including market understanding and stakeholders
analysis.
Collaborative use of the marketplace, to offer services from all IoT-EPI projects and to
support the collaborative capture of requirements.
Resource sharing, to leverage already existing infrastructure from FP7 and other IoT-EPI
projects.
Community building, for all IoT-EPI projects, through for example social networks or
meet-ups.
Joint pilots among IoT-EPI projects.
Among these, the group of participants selected the collaborative requirements elicitation subject
to create a joint development and continue with the next and last phase of the exercise: the value
proposition canvas, which is shown in Figure 45.
Figure 45. Value Proposition Canvas for a "toolkit for capturing requirements and market insights" (Group
1)
With the help of the facilitators, the group proceeded to fill-in a value proposition canvas for the
selected joint development.
The name of the product chosen by the participants was “toolkit for capturing requirements and
market insights”,
Table 9 reports a summary of the collected inputs from the group. Finally, the value proposition
was presented and shared with the other groups and a brief session of exchange and feedback
was held to gather the opinions from other IoT-EPI projects that were not able to participate due
to the limited number of representatives.
Figure 46 shows a picture of the participants from Group 1 after completing the co-creation
exercise.
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Table 9. Value Proposition Canvas summary (Group 1)
Customer
segment
Value proposition Customer
profile area
Customer profile item Value map answer
RIAs, IoT
adopters and
real-life
communities
Toolkit for
capturing
Requirements &
Market Insights
Pains Spending resources for
the same purpose (7
times, one for each IoT-
EPI project)
Sharing knowledge
among IoT-EPI projects
Overlapping
Face-to-face workshops
‘Re-inventing the wheel’ (Common) Online
questionnaires to interact
with end users/adopters
and identify their needs
Gains Real understanding of
end-user needs
Interviews on vertical and
transversal domains/
Interest detection feature
(accounting for the time
spent in a specific
subject)
Incentives provided
through the use of ‘IoT
money’
Gamification approach
using ‘IoT money’
Fun way to collect
requirements
Possible public tendering
(based on the collected
feedback)
Figure 46. Group 1 participants after the co-creation exercise
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5.2.3.2 Group 2
Facilitators
Michele Osella (ISMB) and Anne Hoeer (SISAX)
Involved projects
INTER-IoT, BIG IoT, symbIoTe, TagItSmart!
Summary
As happened for group 1, the exercise started with a brief roundup of the involved RIA projects
where each representative pinpointed the prominent tangible assets made available by the her/his
Consortium to other RIAs. This led to the identification of a portfolio of assets on top of which
joint developments among projects could be developed. Figure 47 shows the post-its collected by
group 2 about RIAs assets during the initial stint while Table 10 classifies them.
Figure 47. Projects’ assets from Group 2
Table 10. Identified assets and corresponding IoT-EPI
project (Group 2)
Identified Asset Project
Meta-middleware INTER-IoT
Business users in the healthcare sector
INTER-IoT
Business users in the logistics sector
INTER-IoT
Layers of federating heterogeneous, multi-domain IoT platforms
BIG IoT
Open APIs BIG IoT
Middleware for interoperability among smart objects
symbIoTe
Unique identification mechanism for IoT connected objects (e.g., mass-market products)
TagItSmart!
Service composition layer TagItSmart
The subsequent stage of the brainstorming was meant to combine those assets (or a subset
thereof) into a compelling commercial proposition able to generate market traction (adopters’
perspective), win-win situations for involved IoT-EPI projects (RIAs’ perspective) and
characterized by societal relevance (end users’ perspective), in line with the ‘value co-creation
validation funnel’ expounded in section 3.4.
The rapid prototyping exercise – conducted through an iterative modus operandi – gradually led
to a convergence in the direction of a multi-stage supply chain orchestrator that allows seamless
tracking of shipment and related product provenance. This is made possible by integrating
TagItSmart! tagging features with a number of RIA IoT platforms (i.e., INTER-IoT, BIG IoT,
symbIoTe) and respective supply chains that could be somehow virtualized. Even though several
application domains have been tentatively explored in view of the interest exhibited by RIAs
(e.g., logistics in general, warehouse management, cold chain management, services delivered to
customers at home), food supply chain was finally selected based on nascent market
opportunities perceived by participants as well specific strategic alignment with some of funded
RIAs.
The solution designed as co-creation joint development is two-tiered in nature: in fact, a
platform-neutral tagging mechanism allows to connect diversified physical objects with the
digital word across multiple application sectors while an asset tracking layer on top on it
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provides a seamless connection for RIAs platforms, which can thus monitor a given item
independently from the ‘native’ RIA that manages such an item in a specific segment of the
value chain (e.g., INTER-IoT adopters residing in the logistics sector could have access – in
pursuance to commercial agreements in place – to an object originally controlled by BIG IoT
thanks to the underlying platform-neutral tagging mechanism).
When it comes to ‘value co-creation validation funnel’, the market traction has been investigated
by means of the Value Proposition Canvas (Figure 48), used as reference tool to assess the
problem-solution fit (see section 4.3).
Figure 48. Value Proposition Canvas for a "multi-stage supply chain orchestrator" (Group 2)
More specifically, Table 11 summarizes the problem-solution fit. As the reader may perceive at
first glance, the value proposition seems to tackle a number of challenges faced by adopters (i.e.,
food logistics operators). Consequently, from the market traction standpoint, this joint
development has what it takes be further elaborated by involved RIAs in view of a substantial
market potential.
Once ascertained the presence of a market traction – precondition for whatever joint
development – positive insights become known also in connection to win-win situations for
RIAs. In fact, while TagItSmart! could reach customer bases peculiar to other RIAs (e.g.,
business users in the logistics sector brought by INTER-IoT), the three partner projects are in the
position of crafting services that access smart objects instantiated by other RIAs’ adopters:
looking at the bottom line, TagItSmart! can remarkably expand its commercial footprint while
INTER-IoT, BIG IoT, symbIoTe could exploit new market avenues by relying on an existing
platform-agnostic tagging mechanism that shortens the time-to-market and minimizes additional
costs ascribed to development and maintenance.
Moreover, the joint development should not lose sight of societal relevance. In this case, it is
understood that the food supply chain has key societal implications as food pervades the waking
time of humans. In the teeth of one of the weakest economic backdrop for decades, the food
supply chain has to face the societal pressures in terms of food security and capability of feeding
several billion people on the globe: as a result, food supply chain is instrumental to accomplish
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priorities of societal relevance such as – inter alia – minimize waste, make food logistics
economically efficient and environmentally sustainable, preserve stability of food supply,
stimulate virtuous consumption patterns.
Table 11. Problem-solution fit summary from the Value Proposition Canvas (Group 2)
Customer
segment
Value proposition Customer
profile area
Customer profile item Value map answer
Food logistics
operators
(interested in
supply chain
management)
Multi-stage supply
chain orchestrator
(platform-neutral
tagging mechanism
+ asset tracking
layer)
Pains Delay or loss of
shipments
Sensorized tagging
Risk of product label
tampering
Control on food security
and quality
Limited control on
product genuinity
(presence of ‘opaque’
stages of the supply
chain)
Extended coverage from
cradle to grave
Non-communicating
information systems
‘Glue’ among platforms
(i.e., platform-agnostic
tagging mechanism)
Lack of privacy perceived
by end users
Fine-grained control on
the information generated
and its usage
Gains Connecting retailers to
customers for marketing
purposes
Tracking of items that
have already reached
customers’ home
Selling items approaching
the end of shelf life
Condition-dependent
dynamic pricing
mechanism
Finally, the outcomes were presented to other workshop participant by means of a pitch given by
a spokesperson, followed by some conclusive comments provided by facilitators and a brief
session devoted to feedback collection and definition of next steps for fortifying the joint
development designed at the workshop.
5.2.3.3 Group 3
Facilitators
Claudio Pastrone (ISMB) and Alex Gluhak (DIGICAT)
Involved projects
BIG IoT, INTER-IoT, VICINITY, AGILE
Summary
Following the proposed methodology, the first phase of the exercise started with a brainstorming
where each RIA representative shortly introduced the relevant project and highlighted the major
tangible assets that could be made available to other RIAs to promote joint developments. The
first set of identified assets was further discussed and refined to include only the ones ascertained
to be more significant. The result of this process is summarized in Figure 49 that shows the post-
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its collected during the brainstorming by Group 3 and in Table 12 which presents the
classification of the gathered inputs.
Figure 49. Projects’ assets from Group 3
Table 12. Identified assets and corresponding IoT-EPI
project (Group 3)
Identified Asset Project
Market place service BIG IoT
Semantic interoperability components
BIG IoT
Semantic interoperability components
INTER-IoT
Semantic interoperability components
VICINITY
Semantic interoperability components
AGILE
The subsequent phase focused on the identification of opportunities for joint endeavours
involving RIA projects and possibly exploiting the classified assets. As shown in Figure 50,
post-its were used to collect the different proposals that, in fact, resulted to be different in nature.
Figure 50. Possible Joint Developments identified by Group 3
The discussion actually led to the identification of possible synergies among the RIA projects
that did not just encompass technical developments. More specifically, the identified joint
development focused on the following subjects:
- Joint solutions for final developers/adopters to offer an easy and robust access to IoT data
coming from different IoT platforms;
- Joint planning of specific pilot activities;
- Resources sharing to magnify the results being achieved for specific possibly joint
activities;
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- Sharing of common methodologies;
- Sharing of resources/assets/knowledge to support recruiting of end users for pilots;
- Joint community building for all IoT-EPI projects;
- Collaboration among the IoT-EPI project to support the organization of hackathons
and/or other dissemination events.
Figure 51. Value Proposition Canvas for an "Easy-access data toolkit" (Group 3)
The group proceeded with the discussion by further analysing the result of the brainstorming and
understand how to exploit the identified assets to define a joint proposition, validating on the
bases of mutual benefits, market traction and societal relevance.
The co-creation exercise gradually converged to a jointly developed toolkit enabling easy access
to heterogeneous data.
Table 13. Problem-solution fit summary from the Value Proposition Canvas (Group 3)
Customer
segment
Value proposition Customer
profile area
Customer profile item Value map answer
IoT Start-ups
and SMEs
Easy-access to
heterogeneous data
toolkit
Pains Return of Investment
(ROI)
Lack of maturity of the
offered solutions
Sharing common
methodology
Lack of sustainability of
the offered solutions
Tutorials and
documentation provided
and constantly updated
Gains Platform lock-in
prevention
Enabling platform
interoperability
Reducing costs and
development time
Providing easy
development tools
Access to heterogeneous
data and sensors
Providing transparent
access to heterogeneous
resources
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Figure 52. Picture of group 3 participants after the workshop
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6. CONCLUSIONS
This deliverable has presented the brand-new value co-creation framework unveiled and
experimented within the context of the UNIFY-IoT project.
A summary covering existing theoretical approaches regarding value co-creation and how this
concept has been used hitherto in IoT was presented, where the notion of value-co-creation
emerged as key enabler for engaging a variety of heterogeneous yet complementary stakeholders
(from large scale companies to SMEs, passing through end users, governmental bodies and
NGOs) into an open innovation ecosystem.
The proposed value co-creation framework that forms the core of the present deliverable is made
up of four pillars:
‘Why’, which has to do with motivations driving the co-creation effort under
construction;
‘What’ which explains the value proposition that is offered as result of the co-creation
effort;
‘Where’, which situates the target market in which the value proposition is offered,
taking stock of the entire IoT ecosystem, and
‘How’ which examines the key decisions that involved RIAs have necessarily to consider
(a.k.a. levers) while building the joint developments.
The proposed framework could be considered a handy toolkit that the consortium has made
available to IoT-EPI projects and relevant stakeholders, and in general to IoT professionals to
support the co-design of IoT joint developments.
The toolkit embraces a design thinking inspired approach aimed at a practical, creative resolution
of problems and creation of solutions, leveraging an agile mindset and an iterative modus
operandi based on the rapid prototyping of self-contained, intermediate solutions that could also
work as potential starting points for alternative paths. In designing the framework, UNIFY-IoT
consortium opted for an IoT-EPI-centric perspective and, as a result, a number of promising
converging trajectories – explored during the Value Co-Creation Workshop held in Valencia –
were identified.
To set solid foundations for the proposed value co-creation framework, UNIFY-IoT designed a
wide-spectrum questionnaire to capture an overview of the value propositions offered by IoT-
EPI projects.
Results gathered from this activity were presented were it was evidentiated that most projects are
already implementing some value co-creation mechanisms internally within their stakeholder
network.
Inputs collected from this activity were fed into the framework, together with results from IoT-
EPI task forces, which provided important insight to design a fruitful, hands-on workshop during
the common IoT-EPI meeting held in Valencia in June 2016.
The workshop allowed the consortium to test the preliminary value co-creation framework and
permitted IoT-EPI projects to familiarize with value co-creation concepts and mechanisms,
encouraging them to work together towards the realization of joint developments.
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8. APPENDICES
Appendix I: IoT Value co-creation framework questionnaire
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Appendix II: Value Co-Creation Workshop
Facilitators (UNIFY-IoT)
Maurizio Spirito (ISMB)
Claudio Pastrone (ISMB)
Maria Teresa Delgado (ISMB)
Michele Osella (ISMB)
Veronica Barchetti (HIT)
Anne Hoeer (SISAX)
Alex Gluhak (DIGICAT)
Participants
Organization Project Eclipse AGILE
PICOM TagItSmart!
Rinicom INTER-IoT
UPVLC INTER-IoT
innoTSD UNIFY-IoT
HIT UNIFY-IoT
innoTSD UNIFY-IoT
IS-Practice bIoTope
ISMB UNIFY-IoT
CSI BIG IoT
XLAB INTER-IoT
Univ. of Zagreb symbIoTe
Fraunhofer IOSB symbIoTe
TU/e INTER-IoT
BIG-IoT NUIGALWAY – Insight Centre for Data Analytics
UNIFY-IoT DIGITAL CATAPULT
BIG IoT NUIG-INSIGHT-CENTRE
VICINITY ATOS
WP Neways
UNIFY-IoT Digital Catapult
Be-IoT European Innovation Group
BIG IoT ATOS
VICINITY HAFENSTROM
Project Groups
AGILE TagItSmart! INTER-
IoT
bIoTope BIG IoT SimbIoTe VICINITY
2 participants 1 participant 4 participants 1 participant 4 participant 2 participants 2 participants