1 INTRODUCTION
Digital transformation has taken the world by storm over the last five years . Any enterprise or industry could not avoid asking " What does digital transformation imply for us ?" The answers to this question usually revolve around adopting technologies that have become mature and mainstream to create new or modify existing business processes and customer engagement strategies .
Digital Transformation in industries goes by different names , such as Industrie 4.0 ( Germany ), Industrie du futur ( France ), Made in China 2025 ( China ), or Smart Manufacturing ( US ), to name a few . Over the past few years , the convergence of artificial intelligence , blockchain , cloud computing , edge computing , Internet of Things ( IoT ), 5G , computer vision and augmented / virtual reality have been supporting the creation of even more and more complex Digital Twins . While every progress in these technologies is pushing the digital twins closer to their real-world counterpart , these are also driving the industry through the next wave of the digital revolution .
Although the rapid growth of IoT in consumer and industrial markets is driving society ’ s ongoing digital transformation and datafication 1 in many amazing ways , today ’ s IoT businesses , like other dominant Web2 platforms , are primarily built upon centralized infrastructures and fully managed by enterprises . Such a centralized approach , while enabling enterprises to maximize its business value extraction and advantaging the biggest players , is more and more questioned by public opinion and governments , especially in light of the latest geopolitical events . Data governance , ownership , and sovereignty threaten the business models on which big players have been thriving so far . The introduction of blockchain and Web3 , i . e ., the third iteration of the internet , provides new perspectives and growth opportunities for IoT businesses by realizing the so-called machine economy .
In this article , we introduce the emerging machine economy and explain why it is becoming a new frontier of digital transformation in IoT from both technology and business aspects . We also discuss several machine economy use cases in practice . The rest of the article is as follows : Section 2 defines the machine economy and describes its key enablers and success factors . Section 3 presents three machine economy-oriented business models . Section 4 discusses several existing and ongoing machine economy use cases . Finally , the article concludes in Section 5 .
2 MACHINE ECONOMY
In this section , we first introduce the machine economy and then describe the three key enabling technologies behind it . In the last part , we discuss the machine economy ’ s key success technology and business factors .
1 https :// en . wikipedia . org / wiki / Datafication IIC Journal of Innovation 3