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1. Introduction
Knowledge is increasingly being recognised as the most important resource by organisations; in fact, it is a key differentiating factor in today’s business arena. Knowledge is defined as the dynamic human process of justifying one’s personal belief towards the truth (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995). It can also be defined as “know-why”, “know-how” and “know-who”, or as an intangible economic resource from which future resources will be derived (Rennie, 1999). Knowledge is built from data which are first processed into information (i.e. relevant associations and patterns). The literature defines information as “organized data” (Saint-Onge, 2002) and as “data endowed with relevance and purpose” (Drucker, 2001). Information becomes knowledge when it enters the system and when it is validated (either collectively or individually) as a relevant and useful piece of knowledge to implement within the system (Carrillo et al., 2000).
According to Brelade and Harman (2002), knowledge management (KM) is “obtaining and using resources to create an environment in which individuals have access to information and in which individuals obtain, share and use this information to raise the level of their knowledge”. In addition to this, individuals are encouraged and enabled to obtain new information to be used by the organisation. One of the main aims of KM is the process of refining data that come from unreliable sources (Raisinghani and Schkade, 1999). Today, KM is capable of handling real-time updates because of its use of the Internet of Things (IoT). KM today has the opportunity and the capability to synthesise data from diverse sources and to arrive at new knowledge.
Because of the IoT, businesses today are forced to rethink their goals and to reconsider how value is created. A business model describes the rationale of how an organisation creates, delivers and captures value. A service that is made up of a combination of physical and digital elements opens up new channels and opportunities for monetisation or value exchange. Because the IoT also takes advantage of new, cloud-based opportunities, companies need to fundamentally rethink their orthodoxies about value creation and value capture. Simply reusing well-known frameworks and streamlining established business models will not be enough for leveraging the IoT to create and capture value.
Value creation, which involves performing activities that increase the...