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Smart Products |
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Prof. Dr. E. Fleisch / PD Dr.-Ing. Wolfgang Maass |
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Portrait of the Smart Products Research Group
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Recent innovations in mobile and sensor technologies allow the creation of digital representations of almost any physical entity and its parameters over time at any place. Digital representations of global environments are gained by remote sensing systems, such as satellite-based systems or video-based control systems, and used as fundament of innovative services, such as Google Earth.
What does this mean for future kinds of products? Products are increasingly required to intelligently adapt to customer needs and changes in usage situations. The future of such Smart Products will involve having considerable intelligence embedded in the products, which will rely on sensors, processors, and communication modules to create smart interactions with customers, other products, and the whole environment. The main idea is to satisfy customers by offering them what they need, what they want, and something they may be interested in once they figure out that such things actually exist.
The concept of a Smart Product investigates new ways for interactions between various user types and products in all stages of a product lifecycle that might enable innovative business models. Hence, the vision of Smart Products raises research questions on the technical side, such as, which architectures are applicable, which kind of semantic representations and processing services are required, which services allow adaptation to consumer needs and which kind of telecommunication infrastructure will enable Smart Product communication in a secure and robust manner.
The rational is to leverage positive effects known from desktop-centred online scenarios, such as purchase decisions, new product opportunities or trust building within real-life scenarios. The concept of a Smart Product extends traditional views on products in the sense that they can adapt tangible products to usage contexts, which leads to three core requirements:
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adaptation to situational contexts, |
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adaptation to actors that interact with products or product bundles, and |
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adaptation to underlying business constraints. |
Research on Smart Products adopts an intrinsically multidisciplinary approach and therefore applies methods from Information Management, Innovation Management, Social Science, Marketing Science and Computer Science. |
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