Strategies for managing smart products and services

Abstract

Smart products are here to stay. Some will enable ground-breaking business innovations, catapulting the companies that launch them into leadership in enormously profitable new market sectors. Others will disrupt traditional market leaders and open industry sectors to a rush of new entrants. A significant number will fail to attract any consumer following and fade from view. Whether or not a company aspires to create a transformational and market-leading new consumer solution, wants to avoid being blindsided by unexpected competition, or needs to understand the impact of embedded product intelligence for its industry and technology roadmap, smart products will play a prominent role in their future strategic options. There is no guaranteed formula for smart product success, but there are a lot of predictable pitfalls that managers can avoid through a better understanding of the dynamics of smart product ecosystems and embedded control. This chapter distills the lessons from smart product initiatives across industries to offer recommendations for analyzing the impact of smart products on industry sectors, for selecting a smart ecosystem model, and for developing corporate strategies that deliver visible customer value through smart product platforms and services. It concludes that smart products will succeed to the extent that they make the value of smart services enabled by a smart product platform highly visible and accessible to the consumer.