IoT Next Phase

Development of the IoT and its modules (Figure 2) is rapid, and mostly focuses on technological development. However, the development of business support is equally important. The European Union’s (EU) Digital Single Market Strategy (DSMS) is looking to “maximize the growth potential of digital economy” (European Commission 2015). In this context, the development of European competitiveness in the IoT field is of high priority across all sectors. The development of the IoT domain can be seen as crucial for the DSMS. For this purpose, the European Commission launched in 2016 the Digitizing European Industry (DEI) initiative (European Commission 2016).  The commission outlined that the IoT represents the next step of disruptive digital innovation where physical and virtual objects are inter-connected to others and to the Internet, these objects can be things or humans (European Commission 2016).

As part of the work in the Horizon-funded Next Generation Internet of Things (NGIoT) project, Europe’s competitiveness in different sectors was inspected and matched to the IoT’s importance in the given industry (Brékine et al. 2020). The results of this research are shown in Figure 4. As seen in this figure, the need for the development of the IoT can be matched to specific sectors to have a high impact. Also, some of the most important sectors regarding the Finnish IoT scheme have been recognized (blue), and sectors with the highest competitiveness development potential have been marked (green). Blue arrows are the authors’ predictions regarding where national IoT research and development (R&D) can take the sectors if development work is performed in association with EU-level R&D work.

To leverage the full potential of the IoT, input from society and end users is needed; this is also a matter of knowledge sharing. For example, in solutions that aim to support the European Green Deal, cities and communities should be involved in the whole development process of IoT applications.

IoT demystification: Technology companies believe that widespread adoption of the IoT has not yet been achieved. To enable wider use of the IoT, they say it is important to build a new model for user-driven development. Demystification of the IoT should be one of the IoT Next Phase goals, ensuring that new end users, sectors, and applications can be reached. Focusing on services instead of IoT technology might help make its benefits clearer.

End-user-based development: The ability to utilize information is important for the end user. The end user must understand how the data can be utilized and how he or she can develop his or her own business with the help of the collected data. Typically, business streamlining happens either through streamlining existing business processes or by finding new business areas based on IoT technology and data.

The internet of bio things (IoBT):  The IoBT is the bridging of biological systems via bioelectronics, offers breakthroughs in fields such as biomedicine that emphasize predictive, preventive, personalized, and participatory (P4) healthcare instead of reactive disease care. The technologies that have become available will offer tools to assemble novel biosensors to advance them toward large data collection via the P4 medicine strategy. Moreover, these emerging tools provide more penetrative bio games, biofeedback-based education, and large-scale natural process censoring for a circular economy. These measures will create new ways for the development of sociobiological ecosystems, contribute to better awareness of the roles of establishments in social dynamics in learning, education, and innovation/business development, and offer cost savings.

Ecosystem thinking for knowledge sharing: Here, the goal is to find ways to teach students about the ecosystem. The aim is to achieve integration between campuses, laboratories, and industry. There is a need for industry interaction between teachers and students to increase entrepreneurship and innovation through strategic partnerships and to build long-term technological visions and business models for universities.

Sustainable development: Digitalization is expected to advance the sustainable development of societies, even if it can also cause risks due to the associated increase in energy consumption, materials used in electronics, or misuse of technology. By being continuously aware of risks, however, their probability can be decreased. Digitalization is certain to create substantial benefits, and IoT technology will play a key role in producing, refining, and sharing data to be utilized by various actors. Through IoT technology, people can continuously receive data from their environment at home, work, or leisure. By receiving data, people can make personal decisions to act in a more sustainable way. They will also receive information about which actions are discouraged, which will result in changes to their behavior. Similarly, businesses can utilize data from various sources to, for example, improve their processes, decrease their energy consumption, or develop digital products and services. In the smart city context, the IoT brings advantages to many sectors, such as mobility, wellbeing, and health services, as well as education and property management, which can be developed to follow sustainability principles by utilizing data (Matinmikko-Blue et al. 2020). Many of the actions that IoT-enabled solutions perform relate to individuals (e.g., through information collection or using this information to make decisions that affect individuals). As the number of IoT devices grows and IoT solutions move closer to our daily lives, it is important to act toward creating a responsible IoT system. One approach is to adopt digital responsibility goals (DRGs).

In Figure 5, the DGRs are illustrated. Once a company adopts these goals, it makes a commitment to the following:

A) Implementing up-to-date cybersecurity in all components and parts of the process

B) Taking privacy into account at the point of data collection

C) Adopting data fairness, even when not handling personal data

D) Processing data with the goal of trustworthiness

E) Proactively creating transparency for users and all other stakeholders about the principles that underlie their digital offerings

(Meier et al. 2021)

With these commitments, companies can build a sustainable IoT and other digital systems. However, how these can be applied in practice is something that future R&D will/can define.

As a rich source of valuable data, new IoT solutions (Table 2.) will serve as the baseline for new revenue and business models in Industry 4.0.

The data economy: Companies need to understand the future of the data economy and how it will be applied in their own businesses. In the new economy, new approaches to producing and consuming data should be invented. To support this, legislative initiatives in the European Union (EU) are currently in progress. The Data Governance Act (DGA) has recently been approved, and data service-related acts (e.g., DMA, DSA) are under intensive discussion in 2022.

Also, the EU’s Data Act (DA), Cyber Resilience Act, and the forthcoming regulations within the digital finance package will boost not only the European data-sharing economy, but also emerging businesses in data analytics and other added-value services within the open data environment. At the same time, specifications of the European data space are promoted by the Data Space Business Alliance (DSBA), and their activities are expected to yield initial specifications soon, which will then lead to the first reference implementations in the data marketplace in 2023–2024.

All of this will require intensive monitoring of this evolving data space by all actors. Data generated by IoT systems will also receive a new level of added value and even become objects for trading. The multiplicative effects in technological development, IoT platforms, business models, and new services will be substantial. Thus, R&D activities across the whole new value chain must be intensified considerably. This should also have consequences for education, especially regarding the sharing of information and knowledge transfer that occurs in higher education and research institutes. Furthermore, the data economy will introduce new business and revenue models for its participating companies, which may require the discovery of new resourcing and funding models, especially for SMEs to survive in a changing environment.

Ecosystem thinking: In an ecosystem, each stakeholder must define its motivation and justification to act as part of the ecosystem. End-user companies may not have the ability to start building IoT-based intelligence for their own business applications. They need to develop their knowledge to identify trusted technology vendors to build their systems and understand the needs of their companies. End users need an accessible network with the ability to implement a customized system to support the company’s business.

Data ownership: The system vendor must understand the customer’s interest in data ownership. Issues regarding data ownership in the customer’s data system need to be discussed and agreed upon during the system construction phase so that the value of the collected data does not fall into the wrong hands.

Table 3. Suggested R&D objectives and actions

It is hard to estimate how much will be spent on IoT solutions during the next 5–10 years. Some estimations have arrived at nearly US$6 trillion during the next five years. With IoT solutions, companies and organizations are looking at lower operating costs, increased productivity, and the development of new products through the IoT. All of this will accelerate the future development of the IoT. The development in IoT Next Phase will happen on multiple different levels, including business, societal, and technological development.

In the future, the IoT will be more user- and use-case centric in the development stage and in its data collection and data usage. This means that IoT devices will be more focused on specific use cases. Also, applications and their features (e.g., AI and data processing) will move closer to the usage point. This development will cause existing cloud-heavy solutions to switch to more device-oriented solutions. As devices are more responsible for data processing and decision making, they will also need to transfer the data faster and with lower latency. This means that the devices will be more dependent on other devices and edge nodes. All this will lead to a new overall IoT architecture (Figure 6).

As we move toward a sustainable world, the IoT also needs to be both greener and more sustainable in the future. This can be achieved either through achieving a high recycling rate or by making IoT devices sustainable while using new electronics. Sustainability also challenges the ways in which we collect and process data in IoT ecosystems. End users are increasingly aware of their data privacy, but in the future, they will also require that data be processed and stored in a fair, transparent, and trustworthy way. When more data is processed, it requires more energy, so developers of IoT applications need to be aware of their role in sustainability.

The next phase of the IoT requires research, development, and go-to-market actions (as defined in the previous chapter’s tables). These actions can be funded by either national or European instruments. By leveraging funding possibilities, Finnish companies and organizations can achieve competitiveness and an increase in their value through the IoT, as estimated in Figure 7. The figure graphically illustrates the actions that are needed, and their possible funding instruments.