Businessworld, India: Assistant Vice President of Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work Says Digital Data from Smart Products can Help Strengthen Customer Relationships and Create Profitable Sales Channels

“The opportunities unleashed by smart products are seemingly endless for any company seeking game-changing innovation or new levels of efficiency,” writes Euan Davis. “However, product companies need to get on board, and fast, to ensure they are not left behind in the quickly intensifying and accelerating smart product market.” Excerpts:

“If properly instrumented and personalized, smart products can exude reams of insight on product usage and status across the value chain, and can also inform continuous product improvements and influence strategic moves into connected and/or radically adjacent markets.

The digital data emanating from smart products is where value or alchemy can be found. By distilling and applying the insights gleaned from product intersections, manufacturers (and other players in the value chain) can strengthen customer relationships and create new and more profitable sales channels.

But along with these opportunities, there is a flipside: Smart products also introduce uncertainty as they dramatically disrupt marketplaces and existing business models. Leaders need to plan for a period of profound change and uncertainty, and lay the groundwork to forge a new business model with data mastery at its core.

The vast IP product infrastructure that is currently being built allows companies to add intelligence to almost any object or device, learn from it, and enable product data to be shared and applied to strategic business decisions.

Identify a smart product initiative and focus. Engage customers at the start of the journey. Develop the mindset to experiment. Recalibrate processes and the business model. Start the process of striking new, innovative partnership approaches.

The ability to listen closely to the customer — or partner with someone that can — will fuel seemingly endless and unforeseen value creation as the blending of a product’s physical characteristics with its virtual capabilities becomes the rule rather than the exception.”

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