When designing an IoT solution, there is a school of thought that says companies should start this process by creating a minimum viable ecosystem. A great place to begin is to start the process by determining which core competencies your value proposition can bring, and what customer needs your organization’s solution can fulfill. From there it is easy to figure out what might be is missing. This way you can find potential partners that can fill the void so that your organization can then offer an ecosystem type solution, as opposed to just offering a component. The article that follows cites some excellent examples of this.
There is a ton of talk in the hardware world these days about creating a minimum viable product (MVP) that you can show to customers or investors before investing big money — and time — into a final device. The idea is that you’ll learn a lot through the creation process and even more from how customers interact with the device, learnings that might influence its final design.
However, I recently had a conversation with Pilgrim Beart, who brought the concept of a minimum viable ecosystem to my attention. Beart is CEO of Device Pilot, a company that provides business intelligence from various different devices in one place. With the internet of things, companies are no longer trying to create a product to offer value, but rather establish relationships between companies and individuals to create value. But to understand how those relationships should develop means that product designers need to think about not just a device but how to establish relationships between entities that will work with a device.
