Reinventing the Product: How to Transform your Business and Create Value in the Digital Age, reviewed

By@SimonCocking review of Reinventing the Product: How to Transform your Business and Create Value in the Digital Age, 1st Edition. Available here. 

Digital technology is simultaneously friend and foe: highly disruptive, yet it cannot be ignored. Companies that fail to make use of it put themselves in the line of fire for disintermediation or even eradication. But digital technology is also the biggest opportunity to reposition incumbent product-making businesses by thinking about how they conceive, make, distribute and support the next generation of goods in the marketplace.

Reinventing the Product looks at the ways traditional products are transforming into smart connected products and ecosystem platforms at a rate much faster than most organizations think. Eric Schaeffer and David Sovie show how this reinvention is made possible: by AI and digital technologies, such as IoT sensors, blockchain, advanced analytics, cloud and edge computing. They show how to deliver truly intelligent, and potentially even autonomous, products with the more personalized and compelling experiences that today’s users, consumers and enterprises expect.

Reinventing the Product makes a stringent case for companies to rethink their product strategy, their innovation and engineering processes, and the entire culture to build the future generations of successful ‘living products’. Featuring case studies from global organizations such as Faurecia, Signify, Symmons and Haier and interviews with thought leaders and business executives from top companies including Amazon, ABB, Tesla, Samsung and Google, this book provides practical advice for product-making companies as they embark on, or accelerate, their digitization journey.

For businesses looking to future proof their own existence, this is a smart, logical and enjoyable book to read. They lay out their rationale, theory and processes to follow well, but they also supplement this well with a good final section called ‘Insights from the field’. This makes good, practical reading, especially with a section on Tesla, including an outline of Elon Musk’s aim to allow developers from across the whole organisation to speak directly with each other. Having worked as a software developer at one multinational where in-house developers were constantly creating new wikis which duplicated insights, shortcuts and smart workarounds already developed (unknowingly) elsewhere in the company, it is clear to see the value in Musk’s approach. This section and the rest of the book is full of other good insights like this.

Both authors are well versed in this area, aware of the complexity of achieving these goals, but also recognising the importance of trying to formulate a clear and effective strategy to ensure that companies remain relevant and competitive. If you are hoping to achieve similar results for your own organisation then books like this are a smart investment of your time. With examples and interviews from China and a variety of industries from around the world they aim to ensure that they have not only looked at one type of sector or solution to assess various strategies for success. We enjoyed reading this book and look forward to hearing more on this topic from these authors.

About the Authors

Eric Schaeffer leads, as a Senior Managing Director, Accenture’s Product Industry X.0 practice, bringing together services across innovation, engineering and product development, manufacturing and digital operations, and product services optimization. He is also the Global Lead for Accenture’s Industrial practice, helping automotive, industrial equipment and infrastructure companies to digitally reinvent their businesses and create a new level of innovation and efficiency across the extended connected value chain.

David Sovie is Senior Managing Director at Accenture, and Global Lead for High-Tech Industry where he helps clients digitally reinvent their business across the entire value chain. He also leads the Industry X.0 consulting unit for Accenture’s Communications, Media and Technology group, which provides digital transformation services across the innovation, engineering, manufacturing and product support business functions.

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