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.

Recent progress and diffusion of IoT (Internet of Things), cloud computing and artificial intelligence has brought great opportunities for innovation. However, when implementing the IoT innovation, there are various difficulties not only about technologies and but also about management. This special issue shows the latest trends of IoT innovation and discusses its opportunities and challenges from several important viewpoints of innovation management.

This article reported on the latest industry-level activities and national policies of Industrial IoT in US, Germany and Japan.

All of the three countries positioned the development of Industrial IoT in the higher-level policies to make solutions toward social challenges, but their approaches are different. US takes an approach from IT, based on their remarkable IT competency and data analysis techniques. On the other hand, Germany and Japan take an approach from manufacturing, based on their manufacturing factories in the world. Those Industrial IoT-related activities establishes a partnership with each other and also with other players like China to bring their own advantages together.

It is considered that there are at least two common elements among the activities. One is the marketing that the function is much more enhanced to reduce uncertainty of market and technology and explore partnership. The other is "value co-creation scheme" such as reference architecture and test bed which enables members to design a new ecosystem beforehand from the perspective of open and close strategy.

In the IoT era, due to the progress of the Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies, it is expected that firms can create business value that has never existed. However, in order for firms to derive value from the utilization of the Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies, there are various problems to overcome.

Therefore, in this paper, we reviewed recent studies regarding management in the IoT era including our questionnaire survey, and we also took up GE Aviation's aircraft engine service and JapanTaxi's and Denno Kotsu's car delivery services as case studies. As a result, it was found that the relationship with stakeholders was important in the industrial ecosystems in the IoT era. On the other hand, it was also suggested that the number of firms that have achieved outcomes by utilizing the Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies was still limited.

Recently, the Date Era, we need to understand how the Japanese laws and regulations treat "Data." Also, it is necessary for us to know how to write "data" in drafting research and development contracts, etc., based on those understandings. This paper introduces the outline of the points that we should consider and/or negotiate with the counterparts in order to make data available by making the contracts.

Innovation utilizing IoT (Internet of Things) provides various opportunities not only for large companies but also for medium- and small-sized companies. However, its realization is not easy for them. Engineering design methodology for IoT innovation is required especially for non-ICT experts. In this article, the engineering design that realizes IoT innovation is called "innovation design", and its requirements and issues are discussed with related researches. In addition, this article introduces a concrete innovation design method and describes the future research agendas.

Recent organizations are expected to grow up by innovation management of IoT (Internet of Things) in a broad sense covering from planning to implementation. However, in Japan, there is a shortage of advanced information technology professionals who master IoT and related technologies, and can lead innovation using them. This paper analyzes and classifies requirements of IoT technology and innovation management education for working professionals, then explain some representative educational programs.