Transforming your product into a smart object is a difficult task but something rewarding and probably necessary if you want to survive to your competitors or newcomers.

As a prerequisite before starting all smart projects, strategic and business review must be carried out.

Based on our last projects, below are some questions/issues that you should be able to answer:

• Is your team skilled for embedded technical hardware or software dev?
• Can you generate data from your products? How can you answer customer needs from those data?
• Are you ready to spend significant amount of time and money on this project?
• Time to start R&D program in your company even though your corporate culture is not used to it?
• Are you really ready to transform your product and to change your business model?
• Is your product team ready and motivated for this challenge?

We strongly recommend the reading of the Michael Porter Harvard Business Review page on “How Smart, Connected Products Are Transforming Competition“.

The traditionnal strategic tools (i.e 5 forces and SWOT) are still very useful to make the best analysis and the best decisions.

Do not hesitate to contact us for your transformation projects. We have expertise and references in business and technical consulting to help companies transform their business and their products. To facilitate and accelerate product transformation, we propose usually between 5 to 10 days consultancy + a technical demonstrator to make sure that you get something fast and that can be introduced to your team and/or your beta-customers.