Opening Up the Smart Home

Abstract

Emerging technologies like sensors, mobile devices and internet-of-things enable a new range of smart home services that go beyond simple home automation. The service platforms, on which these services run, are highly disparate based on different technological as well as organizational architectures. In this paper, the authors adopt a platform perspective to classify 42 major currently offered smart living service platforms. The authors analyze the platforms along two dimensions: where the intelligence of the platform is located in the technological architecture (i.e. at user’s premise, in the cloud, on the network or in between) and openness of the platform toward third party service providers which has implications on potential network effects. The authors found that most platforms are located in the user’s home and are kept closed for third party service providers, while only a few cloud-centric, open platforms exists in the market. The authors argue that smart living provides an interesting avenue for studying platform concepts given the diversity of the organizational and technological arrangements of smart living platforms and the conflicting views in literature as to how openness and technical architecture impact innovativeness and viability.