Can all businesses reap IoT rewards?

A com­mon prob­lem with IoT inno­va­tions is devices are not designed to be mar­ket ready and strug­gle to prove their busi­ness case. But the options avail­able to busi­ness­es are grow­ing and help is at hand.

When a health­care start­up need­ed to realise an inno­v­a­tive new con­cept for a health mon­i­tor­ing solu­tion for the elder­ly, it sought help from AND Tech­nol­o­gy Research, a pio­neer­ing UK prod­uct devel­op­ment con­sul­tan­cy.

The start­up had cre­at­ed a sophis­ti­cat­ed algo­rithm to detect when an eldery per­son had fall­en over, which ran on a sen­sor to be placed with­in a person’s shoe.

The idea was this would remove the need for the user to wear or inter­act with the device, but off-the-shelf hard­ware made the prod­uct too big to fit and there­fore unsuit­able for man­u­fac­ture. It was hard to prove the busi­ness case to investors and devel­op­ing a whole new bespoke prod­uct would have been too cost­ly.

Using its c2 plat­form of plug-and-play IoT solu­tions, AND Tech­nol­o­gy Research reengi­neered a low-pow­ered and Blue­tooth-enabled design that fit­ted. It also cre­at­ed an app so it could be used through a smart­phone, mak­ing the device pro­duc­tion ready.

“From begin­ning to end, that job took us two weeks,” says Dr Nico­la Thorn, chief exec­u­tive of AND. “It meant the start­up could show stake­hold­ers a scal­able design that could be tak­en for­wards with­out crip­pling costs to the start­up.”

The num­ber of con­nect­ed IoT devices, includ­ing machines, sen­sors and cam­eras, is fore­cast to hit 43 bil­lion world­wide by 2023, open­ing up huge com­mer­cial oppor­tu­ni­ties. But many devel­op­ers feel lost about where to start when bring­ing new solu­tions to mar­ket and ner­vous about the risks involved.

Many IoT con­sul­tan­cies charge pro­hib­i­tive prices to help firms devel­op bespoke hard­ware and soft­ware solu­tions, where they build every­thing from scratch. Mean­while, do-it-your­self alter­na­tives are usu­al­ly dif­fi­cult to turn into viable, mar­ket-ready prod­ucts and often come with
secu­ri­ty vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties.

AND Tech­nol­o­gy Research offers busi­ness­es from all sec­tors an alter­na­tive. Its care­ful­ly curat­ed c2 plat­form com­pris­es a suite of ful­ly test­ed mod­u­lar tools and ref­er­ence designs that allow bespoke solu­tions to be eas­i­ly built which meet their needs.

The firm then man­ages the prod­uct life cycle of those solu­tions to ensure they run smooth­ly for years to come.

“Busi­ness­es may feel they need to spend large amounts with con­sul­tan­cies to design their sen­sors and prod­ucts from scratch, but too often much of the effort is spent just rein­vent­ing the wheel and cre­at­ing unnec­es­sary costs,” says Thorn.

“Guid­ed by decades of exper­tise, we achieve the same results for a frac­tion of the cost by piec­ing togeth­er easy-to-use mod­ules.”

 As the IoT mar­ket becomes more acces­si­ble to busi­ness­es, they need to think care­ful­ly about how they will invest in and cap­i­talise on dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion. Those that can­not turn inno­va­tions into min­i­mum viable prod­ucts ready for the man­u­fac­tur­ing process will fall at the first hur­dle.

Sim­i­lar­ly, if they do not redesign pre-exist­ing prod­ucts that are under-per­form­ing, they will miss out on rev­enue and effi­cien­cy gains.

AND Tech­nol­o­gy Research has been work­ing in the con­nect­ed devices space since 1980 and offers a wealth of exper­tise. By shep­herd­ing clients’ con­cepts from draw­ing board to mar­ket, it removes the has­sle and high costs of the inno­va­tion process, dra­mat­i­cal­ly reduc­ing the risks of fail­ure.

As more devices are con­nect­ed to the inter­net world­wide, com­pe­ti­tion in the IoT sec­tor will inten­si­fy. There is a risk that a hand­ful of well-resourced giants will come to dom­i­nate if devel­op­ers do not tear down the bar­ri­ers to entry.

By ensur­ing prod­ucts have a strong busi­ness case from the out­set, inno­va­tors will give them­selves the best chance of carv­ing out a space in this fast-grow­ing mar­ket, putting them on a clear­er path to suc­cess in the con­nect­ed future.

If you are look­ing for an award win­ning part­ner to imple­ment an IoT ini­tia­tive in your busi­ness, please vis­it www.andtr.com or email and@andtr.com

Pro­mot­ed by AND Tech