Opportunity to Leverage Information-as-an-Asset in the IoT -- The Road Ahead

In traditional product companies, creating value meant identifying enduring customer needs and manufacturing well-engineered solutions. Two hundred and fifty years after the start of the Industrial Revolution, this pattern of activity plays out every day, especially in a connected world where products are no longer one-and-done. Making money is not anymore limited to physical product sales and other revenue streams become possible after the initial product sale, which are service-based information and knowledge in today's IoT (including subscriptions and apps, new analytics for cognitive capabilities...). While information and knowledge are the new oil of the IoT era, it nonetheless remains challenging to perceive and extract the real value of those assets, as information is not as tangible and concrete as physical assets. In this respect, this paper introduces the major "laws of information" and discusses how they can be leveraged to their full extent thanks to the IoT possibilities. Further, the paper discusses the key challenges that remain to be addressed with respect to the current IoT landscape. Finally, a set of real-life business use cases identified by the Open Platform 3.0 Forum are presented from the information law perspective.