Services based on the Internet of Things (IoT) and Machine to Machine (M2M) communications are actively being proposed for several industries. A lot of initiatives are presented for smart cities, smart homes and smart energy systems. But even with advances in new technology and substantial amount of research funding, most of these services are not deployed on a large scale. Innovation is not needed only for the technical solutions but also for the business models and how actors cooperate. In this paper, a number of projects on smart cities, smart homes and energy systems are presented and compared with some successful cases where new IoT and M2M concepts have been applied. Also, an analysis in presented for the benefits and values that can be identified for different IoT services, including cost saving in service provisioning and ease of use for end-users. It is also studied how drivers, such as improvement in resource utilization, are often hampered by the unwillingness of traditional actors to share a service platform, afraid of losing control over their customers. Examples show how the business models changed or need to be changed. The co-existence of services from parallel sectors and within the same sector is studied in this paper and further compared with a case of competing solutions for the same service (mobile parking). The application of new technology entails changes in the organization of actors; this paper reveals the decreased relevance of some traditional actors, like communication providers, in the service delivery when IoT and M2M solutions are adopted.
