# Business Models for the Internet of Services: State of the Art and Research Agenda
## 5 Discussion  
Through this systematic literature review, we aimed to answer two main research questions: RQ1. What is the state of the art of Internet of Services-based business models? To answer the first research question, we analyzed the selected studies and their developments in IoS by dividing them into four categories according to their focus: infrastructure, service operation, business applications, and social applications. As it is closely-related with technologies paradigms, the review reflects important scenario movements on the Internet environment and on ICT over the past decade. By offering business functions as web services, it is possible to \"break up enterprise boundaries and harmonize services of diverse development platforms. Business services can be made openly available and reusable for supporting collaborative business processes by service orchestration or choreography\" [PERSON] _et al._ (2016). From the categorization in Table 1, it is noticed that the focus of the first papers was much more on IT infrastructure. Although the term \"business model\" was often mentioned in the papers, the content was mainly on SOA, software functions, and how web services should work through the applications (P12; P15; P16; P17; P19; P20), likely the technical pre-requisites to make the business feasible but not a discussion on the business or IoS-based business model. Apart from technical aspects, important questions arise regarding who the suppliers of such services are, how the value capture guarantee that billing and revenue are well structured, and which are more sustainable alternatives for suppliers of such services [PERSON] _et al._ (2016). From a business perspective, there is a need of understanding how value is created through business services. \"A special emphasis has to be given to the generation of new business models for all stakeholders (i.e., service providers, aggregators, and consumers) and corresponding incentive mechanisms\" [PERSON] _et al._ (2016) (P22). However, the value creation, which is one of the main functions of a business model [PERSON] _et al._ (2016), rarely appears among the selected papers that address the business applications. For [PERSON] and [PERSON] [39] (P11), the phenomena of the IoS concern different spheres, yet the focus has been placed on its connection with the IoT. [PERSON] et al. [53] and [PERSON] [38] (P10) state that the IoS is an extension of the IoT, poised to take e-service markets to the next stage. While IoT emerged in the business literature [62; 63; 64], the IoS research remained among the developers' software engineers [49], focused on the infrastructure and appropriate programming codes to develop applications [51; 52; 65; 15]. Although the focus changed from the pure IT infrastructure to a business view in the studies that cover the business and social applications, the authors still emphasize the services being potentialized by the IoT and how IoT is an important infrastructure for IoS [30; 32; 36; 39] (P2, P4, P8, P11). In the Industry 4.0 scenario, the CPS gains the same relevance to form the IoS [29; 34; 35] (P1, P6, P7). The studies explain the business or social application through the technological aspect but lack in the business and organizational aspects. By analyzing the types of business model studied by [PERSON] and [PERSON] [25], the ones that have already a digital mediation platform and exploit the network collaboration, could apply to IoS if some other IoS features are explored. One example is Airbnb, a C2C digital platform that would be stronger if they applied some of the IoS features to shape their existing business model. Additionally, the different payment methods could be combined for value capture in an IoS-based business model, such as subscription, pay-per-use, or ad-based free. Considering the low number of papers that correlate IoS and business model, there is still a gap in understanding how to construct an IoS-based business model.