Initiating an Internet of Things Ecosystem inPractice : A qualitative study carried out at IBM Sweden

Abstract: The Internet of Things (IoT) concludes a network of physical objects equipped withdigital technologies to interact with people and other objects. IoT brings challenges,one way for organisations to address these challenges is by business ecosystems accordingto the analogy of natures ecosystem. This study defines an IoT oriented businessecosystem as an IoT ecosystem, because of the definitions used in the market varies.The purpose of this study was to investigate the critical factors for a working IoTecosystem, as well as propose how these factors can be applied in practice, since thisis absent in the market. A customized research design was conducted for this studyto manage the 17 semi-structured interviews at IBM. The interviews were divided initerations with di↵erent themes, where the result of each iteration was the base forthe decision of the next iteration theme. The result of this study reflected severalcritical perspectives of how to create an IoT ecosystem with partnership, end-userand scalability were recurrent. The conclusion of this were six critical factors of howan organisation can initiate an IoT ecosystem anchored with a product, as well as atool of how to apply these factors in practice.