The evolution from products towards digital platforms: the Schneider Electric case.

Nowadays, servitisation is a common trend among manufacturing firms. Its goal is to increase the understanding of customers’ needs and respond to those needs in the best possible way. In this perspective, digitalization enables servitisation. The Internet of Things is about linking together the physical and the virtual Internet-based world. It allows to track, monitor and interact with physical products, resulting in the enhancement of manufacturing and industrial processes. In this context, many companies focused on the development of IoT-based platforms, which connect devices, industrial assets, etc. in order to gather data and perform data analytics. Accordingly, data collection and analysis are becoming more and more important in managing and understanding of the Global Value Chains, as well as the customers’ emerging needs, helping the companies to drive product innovation and guaranteeing better performances in terms of profitability and competitiveness. Although the results in terms of profits provided by these digital platforms vary greatly from one firm to another, the idea of IoT platforms as an ecosystem that promotes value co-creation beyond corporate boundaries could generate economic viability. In this fast-changing evolutionary path, the number of digital platforms is growing quickly, generating an incredible amount of opportunities and threats for companies, and affecting their strategic decisions. The consequences can be many and varied, for example, affecting the evolution of the firms’ business model. This paper aims at profoundly understanding the Internet of Things and IoT platforms, as well as the changes they generate in the manufacturing industry, by analysing several examples of ongoing real-business cases (e.g. Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure) and investigating the ecosystem perspective.