Products and Processes in the Age of the Internet of Things

Digital technologies influence the everyday lives of individuals, organizations, and society in a variety of ways. One emerging digital technology that has been the subject of much debate in recent years is the Internet of Things (IoT). In the IoT, originally physical objects are equipped with sensors, actors, computing logic, and communication technology. These technologyequipped physical objects, also referred to as smart things, build the nucleus of the IoT. Beyond their role as nucleus of the IoT, smart things can also form product systems, consisting of closely interacting smart things, as well IoT ecosystems, consisting of interacting product systems. The diversity of application fields of the IoT, e.g., Smart City, Smart Mobility, Smart Health, Smart Home, and Smart Factory, provides organizations with a wide range of opportunities. In particular, the IoT affects two elements crucial to an organization’s survival in competitive markets: products and processes. Due to the high potential of the IoT, this doctoral thesis shows how the IoT influences products and processes separately as well as products and processes within an integrated view simultaneously. By connecting the physical with the digital world, the IoT can broaden the range of a product’s functions, e.g., by enabling new digital service offerings. Thus, new products emerge and established products can be further developed. Based on the potential to address customer needs through innovative products, organizations have to decide which smart thing characteristics should be considered by their products in the future (research article #1 and #2). Extending the results of research article #1, research article #2 proposes two classification schemes for smart things, each involving different levels of detail, i.e., a taxonomy of individual smart things and related smart thing clusters. These classification schemes can support organizations, for example, in the development process of smart products. Beyond their influence on products, digital technologies such as the IoT affect business processes along the entire value chain of an organization. However, organizations are still struggling to digitalize business processes and face high levels of uncertainty when determining which technologies they should adopt in order to improve their business processes. To reduce this uncertainty, research article #3 presents a method that guides organizations step-by-step through the identification and selection of digital technologies best suited for improving their business processes. Crucially, the IoT can also affect products and process simultaneously. Based on their fundamental characteristics, smart things can serve as boundary object between customers and organizations, resulting in innovative forms of customer-company and company-company interactions. These innovative interactions lead to changes in the participants’ processes and value propositions. In response, research article #4 presents a domain-specific modeling language that includes all relevant actors – e.g., customers, organizations, and smart things – for designing IoT scenarios with innovative value propositions from a process-oriented and structural view. Research article #5 is thematically linked to research article #4, providing an economic decision model that helps manufacturing organizations to determine and select an optimal sequence of IoT projects with the aim of incorporating IoT technology into the organization’s products, processes, and infrastructure. In particular, the economic feasibility of IoT scenarios in the manufacturing context which were developed with the domain-specific modeling language (research article #4) can be evaluated using the decision model.