What’s in a Smart Thing? : Development of a Multi-layer Taxonomy
Louis Püschel, Maximilian Roeglinger, Helen Schlott · ERef Bayreuth (University of Bayreuth) · 2016
Digital technologies immerse in our private lives and force businesses to rethink existing work practices. Among the emerging digital technologies, the Internet of Things (IoT) is attributed disruptive potential, as it refers to the equipment of physical things with sensor and communication technologies and to the integration of these things into the networked society. Until today, the IoT is low on theoretical insights. Most notably, smart things, which constitute a vital building block of the IoT and the foundation of IoT-based business models, have been neglected by academic research. Taking a smart thing’s perspective, our study aims to complement extant work on the IoT. We offer a multi-layer taxonomy of smart things that comprises ten dimensions structured along the architectural layers of existing IoT stacks (i.e., the thing itself, interaction, data, and services). To evaluate our taxonomy, we used a sample of 50 real-life smart things from the B2C context.