How Does Your Internet of Things (IoT) Strategy Stack Up?

The world is about to be obsessed with smart things and the Internet of Things (IoT) is far bigger than most people realize. Behind all the hype though, there is real substance even though there aren’t many companies that can demonstrate strong use cases. Our everyday electrical, mechanical, or any industrial object will now be connected through Zigbee, Z-Wave, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, NFC, RFID, IPV6, and a proliferation of cheap and small sensors, cloud computing, and big data. The IoT market is expecting an explosive growth and the forecasts for IoT, M2M communication, IoT technology and applications as well as services related to IoT will be worth well over $550 Billion by 2020. Asia Pacific alone (mainly China and India) will be leading a nearly $3 trillion boom in the consumer electronics market between now and 2020 with smart home devices growing the fastest of any segment.

A major chunk of IoT market revenue is expected to come from the consumer, or better referred to as the “prosumer segment”. The market will shift to include the Invisible Internet of Things (IIoT) whose sense and response will be behind everything around us. I guess the biggest innovation here will be the kill switch for us in order to remain “Invisible” when we need to. We sometimes need a time-out from the digital world and that is a luxury for busy people.  

Our 14-months of research at Idea Couture on the future of IoT from non-technical and non-industry POVs presents us with 5 big opportunities that companies don’t see today. As we know, the killer opportunities are often the ones which as first seem ridiculous, crazy, and even lacking clear business models. But, business models can then be discovered when you can demonstrate their value to users.

Any future IoT or IIoT experience design needs to promote the harmonious interactions between humans, society, and objects. The current research in IoT is mainly from the perspective of connecting and managing devices. The humanized, social side of IoT however, has not been properly explored or understood. Our research is from a human-centric perspective focusing on analyzing the tight-coupled relationship between human and opportunistic connection of things. We understand how these micro-ecosystems deliver on unique micro-value propositions.

And even the proliferation of cognitive software that drives autonomous machine-to-machine interactions with deep learning will start to control the objects around us. Imagine a world where billions of algorithms are there to analyze, suggest, negotiate and even fight for our attention (and wallets!), each one representing a unique proprietary algorithm that solves a particular unmet need? By then we need an algorithm that helps us to manage all the other algorithms. Ultimately though, usefulness of any IoT will be defined by the sophistication of their algorithms and what service or behavior that they can activate. It is not just about collecting data – we will have too much data to deal with and we will need algorithms that turn that data into actions and outcome.

There is a brave new world of world opportunities waiting for us!