Producer-side use cases of digitized products: What's best for your company?

Digital technologies are moving into physical products. Smart cars, connected lightbulbs and data-generating tennis rackets are examples of previously “pure” physical products that turned into “digitized products”. Digitizing products offers many use cases for consumers that will hopefully persuade them to buy these products. Yet, as revenues from selling digitized products will remain small in the near future, digitized product manufacturers have to look for other sources of benefits. Producer-side use cases describe how manufacturers can benefit internally from the digitized products they produce. Our article identifies three categories of such use cases: product-, service-, and process-related ones. We suggest digitized product manufacturers to (1) also consider internal value creation opportunities when developing digitized products, (2) take stock and identify blind spots, and (3) prioritize use cases. Our research can help product manufacturers when building a business case for digitizing their products.