The evolution of the Internet of Things (IoT): A computational text analysis

摘要

There is increasing interest in the IoT, in both academia and industry. Extant studies have surveyed the topic of IoT using different approaches. This study takes a digital innovation view of IoT as a complex ecosystem of technologies, industry applications, concepts, methodologies, and social institutions, which is temporally dynamic and evolves over time. The study focuses on three research questions: (1) What are the important elements of the IoT ecosystem? (2) How are such IoT elements connected in the ecosystem? And (3) How have such IoT elements been evolving over time? This study adopts a topic modeling approach and extracts hidden trends from social media data. The popular elements in the IoT ecosystem are cloud computing, big data, and cybersecurity, among others. The analysis provides detailed information about popular categories or topics in the IoT ecosystem, the associations among those topics, and their evolution since 2014. Based on the findings, the study offers implications for practice and suggestions for future research.