Governance of smart living service platforms

Abstract

Today’s smart home concepts are no longer limited to home automation, but increasingly involve smart health, energy, security and entertainment services. Such smart living services are typically offered through sector-specific service platforms that are rarely interoperable and not fully standardized. As a result, an overwhelming variety of service platforms for smart living services is currently on the market. The vast majority of these service platforms suffer from disappointing adoption by both consumers and service providers. This paper aims to provide a structured overview of 42 contemporary smart living service platforms for healthcare, energy, security and entertainment services. We find strong differences between the platforms in terms of technology architecture and governance structure. Technologically, some platforms place the intelligence of the technology architecture within a person’s home, while others place it in the telecommunications network or remotely in the cloud. Regarding governance structure, we find that relatively few platforms are completely open for third parties to provide services on and most of them are partly or even completely closed. The main contribution of the paper is to apply concepts from platform theory to analyse the on-going developments in the smart living domain. We argue that the lack of openness and cross-sectorial interoperability of the service platforms, combined with large differences in the technological architecture, explains why smart living services still struggle to make their way to the market. Based on these findings, we argue that collective action for developing common service platforms that cross traditional industries is needed to break the deadlock of smart living service innovation.