Building an IoT ecosystem for scalable innovation

IoT solutions combine hardware, software, communication technology, data, processes and business models. Few organisations have all the capabilities required to develop, produce, introduce and scale such solutions internally.

The market contained many specialised capabilities, but they were distributed across different companies, research partners and individual specialists. At the same time, there was no shared structure for collaboration, market access, responsibility or commercial participation. As a result, technically promising individual solutions emerged, while joint development and scaling remained difficult.

Hosang Consulting developed a cross-organisational model that connected the different capabilities through one shared value-creation approach. The contribution included: developing a business model for the IoT ecosystem, defining the shared service and collaboration model, identifying the capabilities required across the value chain, engaging partners from research, development, engineering, production and market development.

The contribution also included: building structures for collaboration and project initiation, connecting technical expertise with business development and customer access, initiating and supporting early joint customer projects, testing the central business-model assumptions iteratively, improving the model based on experience from real projects, and positioning the ecosystem as a shared source of interdisciplinary IoT expertise.

A viable foundation was established for project-based collaboration between independent specialists and organisations. The model enabled: the formation of interdisciplinary project teams, shared access to complementary capabilities, the connection of technology and business models, joint responses to customer opportunities, validation of the collaboration model through real projects, and a foundation for the later scaling of the network.

The case demonstrates that complex innovation does not necessarily have to originate within a single organisation. What matters is a structure that reliably connects distributed capabilities, interests and responsibilities.