Internet of Things Business Model Innovation and the Stage-Gate Process: An Exploratory Analysis

Large manufacturing companies will in future be continuously challenged to develop and implement new IoT-related business models. Existing research offers interesting insights on high-level stages of business model innovation (BMI) processes in general. However, only little is known about the presence of main gates in BMI processes and even less about the underlying decision criteria applied at these gates. To shed more light on this research field, 27 expert interviews with employees from eight companies across the IoT ecosystem were conducted. The expert interviews reveal that, despite the increasing popularity of (radically) new innovation approaches, two main decision points can be identified across BMI processes. These findings are a first explorative step towards a better understanding of IoT adoption and provide a starting point for interesting future research avenues.