Business Value and Business Model Innovation in Decentralized Interoperability Scenarios: The NisB Case

NisB-short for The Network is the Business-facilitates a network of heterogeneous information producers and consumers that share a common interest in harmonizing their knowledge assets. By trading knowledge assets, the network establishes and refines interoperability between its parties. The value of the accumulated interoperability knowledge in the network improves as more the network grows in parties and assets and that interoperability knowledge constitutes economic value in its own right. The innovative idea is to maintain and refine knowledge, striving for overall consistency. Knowledge creation leverages crowd concepts and the multitude of relationships among individual information items in the same domain. NisB introduces business model archetypes that base the sharing of interoperability assets on a sound economic model balancing investment with gain while stimulating usage. Based on the understanding that many small contributions generate a great value, incentive models and mechanisms will be developed by which realized value consumed by one will compensate the other underlying contributors.