Policy makers and business thinkers alike affirm that by 2025, the link up of physical and digital products could generate more than eleven trillion dollars a year. The Internet of Things (IoT) is at the heart of this with sensors and actuators within networks of computing systems. A report has been generated by the McKinsey Global Institute on areas where the IoT could have massive impacts. These have been identified as – factories, urban planning, healthcare, retail, logistics, work sites, mobility, real estate and offices. Among them, factories are expected to be the biggest revenue churners of up to 3.7 billion US dollars as an upper limit. A key finding of this McKinsey report is that majority of the data warehousing that takes place from IoT devices does not get utilized. Another key finding is the lack of alignment between various devices leading to erosion of economic value. IoT also has a massive scope for growth in the developing countries, yet the focus remains on developed and industrialized ones. Customers will gain massively if all this business intelligence gleaned from the data is used in the right manner to provide solutions in the healthcare segment. A lot of futuristic producers have already taken note and are developing products keeping this linking in mind. Policy actions are also taking place to ensure an ecosystem be created to best leverage this network of connected devices.

Source:https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/digital-mckinsey/our-insights/the-internet-of-things-the-value-of-digitizing-the-physical-world

Uploaded Date:23 June 2018

The larger corporations have historically had an edge in terms of scaling their operations, providing them with an untenable advantage in terms of competitive advantage. Th benchmark organizations such as Toyota or Danaher have managed to consistently improve upon their operations. This advantage is evaporating a lot of the times during the ongoing digital age. Today, the most successful ones are those that are mining enormous chunks of data available to gauge genuine business intelligence and communicate accordingly with the market. The best use of such raw data is emerging out of the Internet of Things (IoT). There exist four dimensions to IoT’s impact which are – connectivity, speed, accessibility and “anchoring”. There have been some early adopters or winners of this IoT race such as oil companies monitoring capital assets, at far-off locations using sensor data. Auto markers are using assembly-line robots connected by a central controller.

Source:https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/operations/our-insights/how-the-internet-of-things-will-reshape-future-production-systems

Uploaded Date:28 November 2017

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

Some critical steps have been identified before Internet-of-Things (IoT) based startups get launched. First of all, the founding team must realize that constant improvisations may need to be done to create the most perfect of product or deliver such service. A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) must be worked at that only looks at the most functional and basic version that can be created, nothing below which will be acceptable. This MVP must be clearly defined with numbers attached to its acceptance criteria. An 80-20 or even a 70-30 Rule must be applied at. This refers to the validity of the data. If companies wait for a hundred percent accuracy in its business intelligence captured, the time will run out. Thus work must be started along with strategizing ahead even with having a substantial if not complete picture. Startups must never get embroiled in legal compliances, so this part must be dealt with early on right at the outset. While the costing may be done abroad, the production phase must begin on home territory. Instead of large scale data warehousing being done internally, the seemingly infinite Cloud can be leveraged. Similarly, even hardware may be limited with increased over-the-air updates. A top notch writer must be identified to produce content for the team. An unconventional tip to succeed at such startups is to ensure that sleep is not deprived, as that disrupts entire creative cycle.

Source:http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/04/an-insiders-handbook-for-iot-startups/