Periodic Reporting for period 2 - FALCON (Feedback mechanisms Across the Lifecycle for Customer-driven Optimization of iNnovative product-service design)
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2016-07-01 al 2017-12-31
The transformation of socio-economic models led by emerging technologies is changing the relationship of customers to products and services. Customers no longer play a passive role the development process of products and services – they express their experiences with them over many channels such as Internet discussion forums, blogs, chats or social network services. This “collaborative intelligence” holds a wealth of information about how customers experience products and services, as well as their ideas for improvements or new product and service innovations. The use of products is additionally being monitored more and more by IT embedded into or communicating with physical products, such as sensor systems or apps. These systems generate valuable information about precisely how individual products and services are being used.
These channels of product and service usage information together have the potential to significantly contribute to value creation in the innovation chain of product-services, if they are made available in a suitable manner to experts involved in product-service (re-)design. FALCON’s mission was to provide a framework to support both the design new products and value-adding services and the improvement of existing ones on the basis of information generated by customers using products and services, with an aim to improve their sustainability.
FALCON’s goal was to research and develop an innovative platform for user-centric product-service (re-)design based on leveraging user feedback. This was successfully achieved by focussing on five objectives:
(1) To address product-service information collection through Collaborative Intelligence and Product Embedded Information Devices.
(2) To enable product-service knowledge representation, exploitation, openness and diffusion.
(3) To strengthen collaboration and new product-service development through new feedback and feed forward mechanisms in the product life-cycle.
(4) To support innovative product-services design using manufacturing intelligence.
(5) To improve product-service lifecycle assessment approaches through the real-time collection of product-service usage information and related experiences.
These channels of product and service usage information together have the potential to significantly contribute to value creation in the innovation chain of product-services, if they are made available in a suitable manner to experts involved in product-service (re-)design. FALCON’s mission was to provide a framework to support both the design new products and value-adding services and the improvement of existing ones on the basis of information generated by customers using products and services, with an aim to improve their sustainability.
FALCON’s goal was to research and develop an innovative platform for user-centric product-service (re-)design based on leveraging user feedback. This was successfully achieved by focussing on five objectives:
(1) To address product-service information collection through Collaborative Intelligence and Product Embedded Information Devices.
(2) To enable product-service knowledge representation, exploitation, openness and diffusion.
(3) To strengthen collaboration and new product-service development through new feedback and feed forward mechanisms in the product life-cycle.
(4) To support innovative product-services design using manufacturing intelligence.
(5) To improve product-service lifecycle assessment approaches through the real-time collection of product-service usage information and related experiences.
During the first year of the project, the main activities concentrated on the definition of business scenarios for the individual use case sectors: White and Brown Goods, Healthcare Products, Clothing Textiles and High-tech Products. As a first step, Product-Service Systems in each business scenario were defined. Then, AS-IS and TO-BE scenarios including the involved actors were developed. Based on this formalisation of the AS-IS and TO-BE scenarios, the technical and non-technical requirements for the FALCON Virtual Open Platform (FALCON VOP) were derived for each TO-BE scenario.
The second year of the project saw the detailed architecture of FALCON VOP specified according to a refined set of requirements and interaction analyses stemming from the development of a more granular definition of business stories within each business scenario. To better communicate the planned features and functionality of the FALCON VOP to non-technical partners, paper-based mock-ups of the Graphical User Interface (GUI) were created for each front-end module. This allowed the further development of the FALCON VOP to follow an agile and iterative approach.
Work in the final period of the project was concentrated on the finalisation and evaluation of five demonstrators for four business scenarios. The objectives of the evaluation were not only to verify the functionalities of the FALCON VOP, but also to validate their usefulness to each business scenario and to evaluate their added value for (re-)designing PSS. Evaluation showed that their expectations towards the FALCON VOP were mainly fulfilled, and that the platform is user-friendly and increases efficiency in business-related data analysis and collaboration in PSS (re-)design processes. The outcomes of the evaluation were documented as a set of lessons learned for the refinement and further development of the FALCON VOP.
The overall results of the FALCON project are encouraging based on the joint evaluation of the four business scenarios. The FALCON VOP is perceived to offer a high level of gains in each of the business scenarios and holds very promising value propositions.
The FALCON VOP is the result of a research project and as such, the maturity of some parts needs to be increased for market deployment. Nevertheless, the majority of the business scenarios achieved their objectives and the added value generated by the FALCON VOP as well as the improvement of business processes has been validated. The overall solution is ready to be applied as it is, if early adopters show direct interest. On top of that, the evaluation yielded interesting starting points for improvements to the FALCON VOP for the post project-phase.
From the beginning of the project, the FALCON consortium accompanied the research and development process with a methodological exercise towards development of joint and individual exploitation plans of the FALCON VOP. These activities developed a number of Innovative Exploitable Assets (IEAs) and a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and facilitated a discussion focussed on the generation of value for all participants in the project.
The following three phases were identified as steps to ensure viable business development:
- Exploitation Stage 1 relates to the finalisation of pre-industrialization of the components necessary to build the FALCON MVP.
- Exploitation Stage 2 will focus on adapting the offer to the needs of the market. Therefore, dissemination will aim at testing the main assumptions about the FALCON value proposition and helping to fine tune the platform and its functionalities.
- Exploitation Stage 3 will start when the Value Proposition is sufficiently strong to shift the effort to business development. All lessons learned from Stage 2 will be captured in the new dissemination material and communication kit. In total, the intensity of dissemination will be reinforced and focused on the main targets, not only potential customers, but also experts, opinion leaders, complementary software editors and added value resellers.
The second year of the project saw the detailed architecture of FALCON VOP specified according to a refined set of requirements and interaction analyses stemming from the development of a more granular definition of business stories within each business scenario. To better communicate the planned features and functionality of the FALCON VOP to non-technical partners, paper-based mock-ups of the Graphical User Interface (GUI) were created for each front-end module. This allowed the further development of the FALCON VOP to follow an agile and iterative approach.
Work in the final period of the project was concentrated on the finalisation and evaluation of five demonstrators for four business scenarios. The objectives of the evaluation were not only to verify the functionalities of the FALCON VOP, but also to validate their usefulness to each business scenario and to evaluate their added value for (re-)designing PSS. Evaluation showed that their expectations towards the FALCON VOP were mainly fulfilled, and that the platform is user-friendly and increases efficiency in business-related data analysis and collaboration in PSS (re-)design processes. The outcomes of the evaluation were documented as a set of lessons learned for the refinement and further development of the FALCON VOP.
The overall results of the FALCON project are encouraging based on the joint evaluation of the four business scenarios. The FALCON VOP is perceived to offer a high level of gains in each of the business scenarios and holds very promising value propositions.
The FALCON VOP is the result of a research project and as such, the maturity of some parts needs to be increased for market deployment. Nevertheless, the majority of the business scenarios achieved their objectives and the added value generated by the FALCON VOP as well as the improvement of business processes has been validated. The overall solution is ready to be applied as it is, if early adopters show direct interest. On top of that, the evaluation yielded interesting starting points for improvements to the FALCON VOP for the post project-phase.
From the beginning of the project, the FALCON consortium accompanied the research and development process with a methodological exercise towards development of joint and individual exploitation plans of the FALCON VOP. These activities developed a number of Innovative Exploitable Assets (IEAs) and a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and facilitated a discussion focussed on the generation of value for all participants in the project.
The following three phases were identified as steps to ensure viable business development:
- Exploitation Stage 1 relates to the finalisation of pre-industrialization of the components necessary to build the FALCON MVP.
- Exploitation Stage 2 will focus on adapting the offer to the needs of the market. Therefore, dissemination will aim at testing the main assumptions about the FALCON value proposition and helping to fine tune the platform and its functionalities.
- Exploitation Stage 3 will start when the Value Proposition is sufficiently strong to shift the effort to business development. All lessons learned from Stage 2 will be captured in the new dissemination material and communication kit. In total, the intensity of dissemination will be reinforced and focused on the main targets, not only potential customers, but also experts, opinion leaders, complementary software editors and added value resellers.
FALCON outcomes are expected to give significant impact for EU citizens, SMEs and industry through seven main levers:
(1) Market knowledge, enabled with the continuous collection of product experiences, will foster new products-service development that meets various social groups’ expectations.
(2) New business models, developed by analysing user feedback and benchmarking other markets.
(3) Innovation, enabled by product-embedded information devices and context awareness for self-improvement throughout the whole product lifecycle.
(4) Cost effective products, enabled by simplification of product design and adaptation processes, which leads to more customer satisfaction and less waste.
(5) Processes efficiency, enabled with collaborative tools, allowing product, service and process designers to learn and understand how networked intelligent products in IoT can be of advantage.
(6) Serviceability, extended product lifecycles by the establishment of mechanisms facilitating their adaptive servitization with the aim to reduce environmental and social impacts.
(7) Business growth, by ensuring successful adoption of new products and services through better anticipated expectations and improvements.
(1) Market knowledge, enabled with the continuous collection of product experiences, will foster new products-service development that meets various social groups’ expectations.
(2) New business models, developed by analysing user feedback and benchmarking other markets.
(3) Innovation, enabled by product-embedded information devices and context awareness for self-improvement throughout the whole product lifecycle.
(4) Cost effective products, enabled by simplification of product design and adaptation processes, which leads to more customer satisfaction and less waste.
(5) Processes efficiency, enabled with collaborative tools, allowing product, service and process designers to learn and understand how networked intelligent products in IoT can be of advantage.
(6) Serviceability, extended product lifecycles by the establishment of mechanisms facilitating their adaptive servitization with the aim to reduce environmental and social impacts.
(7) Business growth, by ensuring successful adoption of new products and services through better anticipated expectations and improvements.