波士顿：数字生态系统时代-大数据欣欣向荣(7页)

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The Age of Digital Ecosystems: Thriving in a World of Big Databy Tamim Saleh, Jon Brock, Nadjia Yousif, and Andrew LuersJULY 23, 2013

The everyday consumer world of 2020 will look radically different from today’s. Most ordinary devices in the home—heating systems, televisions, cars, watches, toys, light bulbs, sporting goods, home appliances—will have gone digital. They will no longer be islands unto themselves: they will be connected to the Internet and to each other in altogether new ways.

Consumers will increasingly access, monitor, and control their connected digital products and services remotely over the Internet, using smartphones, tablets, laptops, desktop PCs, and other devices. Massive streams of complex, fast-moving “big data” from these digital devices will be stored as personal profiles in the cloud, along with related customer data.

Digital ecosystems are playing a key role in this transformation. An ecosystem is a network of companies, individual contributors, institutions, and customers that interact to create mutual value. In consumer-oriented digital markets, ecosystems are being enabled by standard technical platforms that allow devices, applications, data, products, and services to work together in new ways. For example, insurance companies can collaborate with telecommunications providers to create new pay-per-use insurance products based on shared data. 

We see three types of organizations collaborating in a digital ecosystem. At the center of interconnected devices and services are ecosystem platform owners—in many cases, Apple or Google. Platform owners create the standards-based technical foundation—comprising, for example, operating systems, devices, an app store—that allows the components of the ecosystem to collaborate and interconnect much more easily than if the individual products operated alone. In addition, providers of products and services from different industries collaborate and compete to create value for customers through applications, data, and new digital devices. And in many industries, data aggregators and custodians are emerging to manage the data created by devices and customers and to find new ways of adding value. (See Exhibit 1.)

We believe that digital ecosystems will profoundly disrupt businesses in nearly every consumer-centric industry, including less obvious candidates such as energy. On the positive side, these ecosystems will tap into better connectivity and customer data to create major new products and services and, eventually, profitable markets that do not yet exist. As a result, competing successfully in the future will require a host of new and different capabilities. 

The Connected Home Goes Mobile

This stage in the evolution of consumer products and services isn’t a far-fetched dream. It’s already a reality. New devices and services—ranging from energy thermostats that can adjust the temperature in your home on the basis of your smartphone’s location to intelligent devices in cars that monitor performance and location—appear every day, and they operate together well beyond the confines of the home. (See “Feathering the Digital Nest,” below.) These ever more mobile devices are encouraging diverse industry players to work together and move into new markets. For instance, energy companies have the potential to partner with health care companies to offer a full spectrum of remote home-based monitoring services through smart devices.

Feathering the Digital Nest

The future has already arrived in the form of products such as the sleek Nest Learning Thermostat. The Nest learns your household’s energy-use patterns, turning down the heat when you go to work, warming things up when you get out of bed late on weekends, and turning the system off when you’re on vacation. It works much better than the previous generation of programmable thermostats, which few homeowners have the time or patience to set up and adjust regularly.

An app lets you use a mobile device to adjust your home’s thermostat from anywhere. It also helps you learn how to save energy. One estimate claims that the Nest can reduce household energy consumption by 20 to 30 percent. The device connects through Wi-Fi to a range of Apple devices and is sold in Apple stores along with other products in the Apple digital ecosystem.

Platform owners such as Apple and Google are fueling an intense acceleration of this trend. For an ecosystem to operate efficiently, platform owners and operators must work with a host of others in the platform “stack.” Standardization provides the glue that binds the ecosystem. Exhibit 2 shows the components and degree of standardization in the business-to-consumer platform stack.