IoT Era and Economic Evolution

Abstract

The digital transformation of the industrial structure that first began in electronics industry is set to expand throughout the global economy in the IoT era. The prominent feature of the transformation is that major functions of industrial sectors, such as financial, retail, agriculture, shift into cyber space from the real/asset space. You can see symptom of the function shift in the healthcare, in the energy, in the automobile and even in the manufacturing sector.

The shift which is defined as "Asset Function Virtualization (AFV)", will change global economy to a historic once-in-a-hundred-year period of economic evolution, because technology of value creation and concept of added-value capturing are completely different from those of past 100 years, and because the AFV will enable to artificially determine rules of global competition.

The cloud economy and the API economy that have been growing rapidly since early 2010s will accelerate this trend.

Purpose of this special issue is to understand technological and social background of the AFV, and to share a map and a compass to deal with the economic evolution of the IoT era.