Starting with IoT

Business development with IoT

Your IoT journey is a business journey. Therefore, your product strategy needs to frame the ambition and business objectives of your journey. This is the first step of any IoT journey – where are we going and what do we want to achieve?

Next step is to create and register all the ideas for improving your product with IoT. Normally, some of the ideas are already there and have formed the basis for your IoT business development process. Experience shows that many more ideas can be generated using the strategic framing. However, not all the ideas can be developed. Therefore, a clustering and prioritisation process is needed to select 2-3 ideas to continue work on.

These 2-3 IoT product ideas must be turned into value propositions. The value proposition process frames the idea further, explores the pains and gains and estimates the business potential for the idea. Basically, the business potential is the starting point for the final business case for the product's value proposition. Also, the complexity and difficulty level of the envisioned IoT-enabled product is evaluated. It is recommended to test your product and value propositions with customers to validate them – including the business potential.

FORCE Technology can facilitate the full business development process – including the newest tools and techniques needed for each step. We can also test your product and value propositions – using design panels or other testing techniques.

Defining your path for the IoT journey

All companies have different maturity, capabilities and capacity to undertake an IoT journey. Also, the IoT part of a product consists of many subparts such as electronics and sensors, firmware, network connection, data algorithms and software. So, to succeed it is important to understand your own strengths and weaknesses when including IoT in the business portfolio.

FORCE Technology offers a proven method to map your all IoT related capabilities – in terms of innovation skills, IoT engineering skills, project and portfolio management skills, IT delivery capabilities and capacity, etc. This method has been developed as part of The IoT ecosystem project where has been tested on several companies.

When combining the value propositions with abilities to execute, FORCE Technology can recommend the right approach for the development of the product and value propositions. This recommendation will address topics such as your ability to manage the development projects yourself – maybe supported by an advisor, your ability to deliver parts of the IoT-enabling yourself, the need for external design and building assistance, how to plan and manage the process, etc. Put together, these recommendations will ensure a safe journey going forward. 

If you want to learn more about IoT solutions, please contact us – or read more here.