Blended workforce: A labour force involving close collaboration between humans and intelligent machines in the form of augmentation. Examples include humans collaborating with robots on factory floors or augmented reality applications to assist technicians in complex repair tasks.  

Digital labour: Referring to smart sensors, machines (e.g. robots) or intelligent systems that can do parts of the jobs that only humans used to do.

Ecosystem: A short-hand for “digital” or “connected” ecosystem, which is a distributed, adaptive, open
socio-technical system with properties of self-organization, scalability and sustainability inspired from natural ecosystems. Digital ecosystem models are informed by knowledge of natural ecosystems, especially for aspects related to competition and collaboration among diverse entities.  

Hybrid industries: The intersection between physical industries and digital technologies (e.g. precision agriculture, digital manufacturing, medical robotics, smart transportation). 

Industrial Internet: A short-hand for the industrial applications of IoT, also known as the Industrial Internet of Things, or IIoT. 

Internet of Things (IoT): A network of physical objects that contain embedded technology to communicate and sense or interact with their internal states or the external environment. 

Outcome economy: A marketplace where businesses compete on their ability to deliver quantifiable results that matter to customers rather than just selling products or services, e.g. energy saved, crop yield or machine uptime. Delivering customer outcomes requires sellers to take on greater risks. Managing such risks requires automated quantification capabilities made possible by the Industrial Internet. 

Platforms: A short-hand for “technology” or “software” platform, which is the digital layer that allows business partners to connect and interact from any applications or devices. Through the technology platform, each player in the value network becomes part of a digital ecosystem. Example industry platforms include MyJohnDeere, Qualcomm Life’s 2net and GE’s Predix. 

Physical industries: Sectors of the economy featuring capital-intensive physical infrastructure or assets, including manufacturing, oil and gas, mining, agriculture, utilities, transportation and some parts of healthcare (e.g. hospitals).