ABSTRACT
Introduction Innovations and new technologies are usually the results of endeavours by multiple actors who build on the capabilities of existing technologies. As we saw in the previous chapter, the internet is a good example of a technological platform which emerged from publicly funded research, government research priorities, open communications standards and protocols and an underpinning physical network managed by private operators. The IoT, although a less well-defined system than the internet, is no different in that whatever shape it ultimately takes, it will be the result of research and investments by a wide range of organisations, public and private. The days when single inventors and entrepreneurs such as Bell, Edison and Marconi in the nineteenth century could launch revolutionary innovations on the world from their laboratories are long gone. While some may argue that Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg are modern-day equivalents of their nineteenth-century forebears, the modern world is a far more complex place than that which Alexander Graham Bell faced when he invented the telephone. Although Bill Gates is rightly seen as a pioneer of PC operating software, Microsoft would have been nothing without the hardware platform of the PC developed by IBM and Intel. Steve Jobs’ Apple computer can certainly be credited with transforming the way we interact with PCs, but his use of a mouse with a graphical user interface (GUI) was the result of innovations developed by the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center a decade earlier. While it is true that Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook is regularly used by more than 1 billion people, without the internet, the World Wide Web and ubiquitous connectivity it would never have been possible.
