The Sensing Business Model

The business model concept is not new and there has been an increasing number of papers published, fast growing communities on Business model's (BM) and an abundance of conference sessions and panels on the subject of BM's. Business model and business model innovation has been the focus of substantial attention by both academics and practitioners. However, it appears that researchers and practitioners have yet not researched widely on how sensors can be applied and embedded in BM's and what businesses can gain from sensing business models (Lindgren and Taran in J Green Eng 2:1-10, 2011). Society and Businesses today invest tremendous amount of resources in sensors and digitalization to achieve better and deeper understanding of their BMs. Taking these enormous amounts of resources invested into account, when creating a "sensing BM" still turn out to be a very complex venture and has several invention iteration still to go before we reach a full scale "sensing business model". The paper shows different levels and attempt of sensing business models and shows these in reference of a definition and framework of a sensing business model. Five different businesses-working with different sensing BM's and sensor technology-are presented. The use cases show combination of biological and mechanical sensors together with physical and digital sensors. In combination the sensoring BM could lead businesses into a new area of business modeling.