Abstract

Today’s networked society is populated by complex business ecosystems that have moved away from the centralised firm-centric structure to a more distributed, crowd-driven ecosystem structure that adopts an open participatory value creation model. Such crowd-driven ecosystems take advantage of technological advancements and underlying network effects in order to harness the collective power and intelligence of the crowd. This ability to co-create value by actively collaborating with the crowd has been fueled by the Internet of Things (IoT) introducing new user-centric paradigms, such as mobile crowd sensing (MCS), which leverage the power and the wisdom of the crowd to observe, measure, and make sense of particular phenomena by exploiting user-owned mobile and wearable devices. Crowd-driven IoT ecosystems have emerged taking advantage of technological advancements and underlying network effects in order to harness the collective power and intelligence of the crowd. However, although research in the context of business ecosystems and business models has gained substantial importance in recent years, there is still a limited understanding of the business dynamics of these emerging, technologically advanced, crowddriven ecosystems. The vast majority of existingresearch efforts place emphasis on business models in the IoT context and only a few studies consider business models for IoT ecosystems. However, one can identify a research gap in relation to business models for crowd-driven ecosystems in the IoT context. This study aims to contribute to the emerging crowd-driven IoT ecosystems literature by examining business models in such environments. For this reason both an exploratory and explanatory research approach is employed. This study provides an exploratory review analysis that synthesizes current scientific knowledge and an explanatory framework that facilitates the analysis of business model components and frameworks that correspond to the needs of firm-centric and ecosystem-centric IoT environments. The study concludes by providing suggestions for the business model development for technologically advanced, crowd-driven ecosystems as in the area of IoT based on its findings, establishing this way a solid foundation for future research in the area of crowd-driven IoT ecosystems.