Driving Process Innovation with IoT Field Data

Abstract

Across all industries, smart, connected products-such as connected cars, smart home appliances, smart fitness trackers and connected drilling machines-are altering how manufacturing companies interact with their customers and ultimately how they conduct business. This new generation of offerings results from the merger of the physical and digital worlds, often referred to as the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT solutions involve equipping physical objects and devices with sensors, actuators, and connectivity, and applying data analytics to the digital data streams (DDSs) flowing from the devices to offer complementary digital services. 3 The DDSs provide real-time data on usage and device behavior, as well as on environmental parameters. 4 Figure 1 shows there are four areas (domains) where IoT digital data streams can be used for innovation. These four domains are determined by the DDS source (supply-chain data or field data) and the focus of innovation (product/service or process). Manufacturing companies' early initiatives to benefit from IoT field data focused mainly on offering new digital services 1 Gabriele Piccoli is the accepting senior editor for this article. 2 The authors thank the 46 practitioners who participated in this study for providing interesting insights. Thanks also to Gabriele Piccoli, and two anonymous reviewers, and to Professor Stefan H. Thomke (Harvard Business School), Timo Gessmann (Bosch Digital Solutions) and Dr. Jannis Beese (SAP) for their valuable input and constructive feedback.

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Digital transformation: What we have learned (thus far) and what is next

“…For innovation management, the ubiquity of data-if managed effectively-offers a valuable resource (Bilgeri, Gebauer, Fleisch, & Wortmann, 2019;Chai & Shih, 2017;Chen, Schutz, Kazman, & Matthes, 2017). Moreover, co-creation leveraging social media (Jarvenpaa & Tuunainen, 2013;Roberts & Piller, 2016) or platforms for idea management and experimentation (Benbya & Leidner, 2018;Downes & Nunes, 2013) emerged as a new source of innovation.…”

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