ICIN conference is a series of conferences bringing together leading telecom and internet experts from industry, universities and government worldwide. Its activities started back in 1989, creating a community of experts and researchers which lasts until today. The conference was held at Orange Labs premises in Paris during 17,th 18th and 19th of February.
The topic of this year was ‘Innovation in Services, Networks and Cloud; Connecting People, Things and Machines.‘ focusing on mainly on the technical and business challenges on the next generation of cellular technologies 5G and the development of IoT services. One of the strenghts of the conference has been the great keynote speakers organized, having the opportunity to listen to industry leaders like Orange, Telecom Italia, Ericsson, Huawei or Akamai, as well as world-class universities like Duke University or Columbia University.
The conference was divided in a number of tracks including Service Webification, Network ITzation and Internet of Things. Most of the papers presented were focus on the technical challenges reated to 5G and IoT, covering a number of topics including definition of traffic profiles issues, energy efficiency or definition of architectures for smart cities.
We had the chance to present our paper “Smart Energy: Competitive landscape and innovative business models” in the Internet of Things track. This work has been developed in the context of two EIT ICT Labs projects, LTE4SmartEnergy and M2M Rise, and also as part of the work developed in a number of master thesis in the context of a collaboration between KTH, SSE (Stockholm School of Economics) and Ericsson. Our paper was one of the few analysing the challenges identified in the business domain, however most of the speakers mentioned the importance of not only focusing on the technical side of IoT but also in the very relevent challenges in the social and business domain.
The goal of our paper was to identify the main actors that can be identified in the communication side of smart grid and proposed suitable business models, highlighting the need of collaboration between the actors. The approach used for the actors identification has been selecting a a number of actors including Telecom Equipment Mnufacturers (TEM), Mobile Network Operators (MNO), Global IT Service Player, Utilities provider and Niche Point Solution Player. After identify and do this classification we focused on study its commercial portfolio identifying which are the main communication activities they can perform. Once identified the main actors and their potential activities we used the Business Model Canvas tool to propose a number of business models, dividing the task in four different building blocks defined by the U.S. Department of Energy: Consumer Enablement, Advanced Distributed Operations, Advanced Transmission Operations and Advanced Asset Management. The business modelling task includes activities distribution, partners constellation, value proposition and customer segments. The outcome of the paper is a first approach on how collaborative business models for Smart Energy can be used, further analysis will be needed in order to go deeper in the topic and provide case by case analysis.
