3 MACHINE ECONOMY-ORIENTED BUSINESS MODELS
As noted in recent articles [ 9 ][ 10 ] on Forbes , the emerging machine economy unlocks new opportunities for conventional IoT businesses to redefine their value propositions and customer engagement strategies . This section describes several new business models inspired by the machine economy .
3.1 MACHINE-AS-A-SERVICE ( MAAS )
As valuable assets in the physical world , machines come with certain utilities and can fulfil specific tasks . Machine owners could create a machine-centric business in the machine economy in the following ways :
• Jointly building a machine network : A group of machine owners could jointly build a machine network ( e . g ., a LoRaWAN or 5G network ) in a decentralized manner to provide certain functionalities to the public . The machine owners will be paid based on the predefined rules whenever a customer uses the machine network .
• Jointly owning a machine : A group of people could form a machine DAO and jointly own a machine ( e . g ., an expensive industrial machine ). The revenue generated by the machine will then be distributed to all the stakeholders based on the predefined rules as specified in the machine DAO .
Note that the above two business models enable a community-driven approach to building IoT businesses , which could help organizations reduce the cost of deploying an IoT solution .
3.2 SENSING-AS-A-SERVICE ( S 2 AAS )
An IoT device ’ s most important utility is collecting data from the attached physical object . The collected data is typically sent to a centralized backend processing system for extracting insights that will help IoT business owners make decisions .
With the machine economy , the device owners could leverage DLT to create decentralized marketplaces to share data with interested third parties in a peer-to-peer manner , as illustrated in Figure 2 . Such a business model enables device owners to earn passive income by sharing their device data via a decentralized marketplace , thereby having great potential for customer growth . In particular , device owners fully control device data sharing in this case .
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