Building Pillars Where Bridges are Easy to Imitate - Mediating Technologies in Knowledge-Based Economies

Abstract

We carried out a qualitative investigation of a pioneer of the Industrial Internet of Things operating in Silicon Valley since 1989. We reconstructed a sequence of strategic turns and conceptualized their current business model in a way that is relevant for several other industries enabled by the Internet, generalizing Thompson’s concept of mediating technologies in order to adapt it to contemporary, knowledge-based economies. We propose an interpretive framework for mediating technologies that we express by means of semantic networks.