Towards Ambient Business: Enabling Open Innovation in a World of Ubiquitous Computing

Abstract

Ubiquitous computing enables the development of new innovative applications and services. Particularly influential on future business services will be the connection of the real with the virtual world by embedding computers or smallest processors, memory chips, and sensors into the environment and into physical objects, as well as using natural, multimodal customer interaction. Bearing in mind that ubiquitous computing entails the interaction of mobile smart objects and local smart environments hosted by different service providers, we propose an open approach to encourage the development of new and innovative smart applications and services. Considering the Open Source community, we assert that such an open approach reveals innovation potentials that cannot be achieved in proprietary information system environments. Most research projects, as well as commercial initiatives, however, focus mainly on specific, proprietary applications like smart shopping environments, and do not incorporate further prospects of using an open approach. Therefore, this chapter discusses as a first step the impact of Open Innovation in a world of ubiquitous computing from an economic perspective. Then, the design of an Open Object Information Infrastructure (OOII) that enables Open Innovation in the context of ubiquitous computing is presented. Finally, an innovative smart service called the Federative Library (FedLib), which represents a first instantiation of the OOII, is introduced to demonstrate the feasibility of the design.