In the year 2010, Swedish tech giant Ericsson predicted that there would be fifty billion connected devices on the Internet-of-Things (IoT) network by the year 2020. This was revised to a trillion such objects by IBM for 2015. Marketing research giant Gartner further upped the scales by saying that each household would have around five-hundred connected smart devices by 2020. This constant hype however wears thin when the actual producers and their experiences are taken into account. This mad goldrush does not seem to be bearing fruit on the ground. Another study by Gartner as a follow-up brought out this shocking observation that only a tenth of households have connected home solutions and an even fewer are being used up. All tech providers must pose themselves a few questions to gauge the true usage of IoT at present. One such is whether the connected device or feature actually solve any problem. Do the customers really want the same and if so then how many. The economics of the full scale needs to be weighed in to see a cost-benefit analysis. Another crucial point is whether the work on IoT needs to continue inhouse or outsourced to some Finally, the company must be sure of the customer experience they can offer up.

Source:https://hbr.org/2017/08/do-your-customers-actually-want-a-smart-version-of-your-product?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+harvardbusiness+%28HBR.org%29

Uploaded Date: 27 October 2017