Internet of connected ServGoods: Considerations, consequences and concerns

Abstract

In an earlier paper (Tien 2012), the author augurs that, in contrast to the first and second industrial revolutions which respectively focused on the development and the mass production of goods, the next -or third -industrial revolution is focused on the integration of services and/or goods; it began in this second decade of the 21st Century. The Third Industrial Revolution (TIR) is underpinned by the integration or mass customization of services and/or goods. The benefits of real-time mass customization cannot be over-stated as goods and services become indistinguishable and are co-produced as "ServGoods", resulting in an overwhelming economic advantage to the industrialized countries where the consuming customers are at the same time the co-producing producers. Adding sensors to these ServGoods and letting them connect or communicate among themselves or with other ServGoods can result in an Internet of Things (i.e., connected ServGoods). A number of considerations, consequences and concerns relating to such an Internet of Connected ServGoods are discussed herein.

Business model evolution of customer care services

“…Hardware support is delegated to the OEMs. Google's approach provides an extreme example of a case where tangible and intangible offerings are co-produced with many parties (Tien, 2015).…”

“…The increasing servitization of business has become a global trend; companies are having to look for new revenue streams since global competition has decreased the margins of a purely physical product-based business (Oliva & Kallenberg, 2003;Tien, 2015). In addition, service quality has become increasingly important in many industries (Roy, Lassar, Ganguli, Nguyen & Yu, 2015).…”

Future Research Directions in Supply Chain Configuration Problem

“…Internet of Things allows for capturing data at their origination and mobile technologies enable easy communication (Tien 2015).…”

Untitled

“…The number of networked sensors used in automotive, retail and transportation has increased at the rate of 30% per year [Brown et al 2011;Manyika et al 2013], with the perception that the sensorbased technology could substantially reduce the operational cost by 10-25% [Hahn & Packowski 2015]. The volume of digital data is growing exponentially and expected to reach 35 Zeta bytes by 2020 [Tien 2015]. In this infobesity scenario, companies are increasingly recognizing the value of advanced analytics tools.…”