A MORF-Vision Method for Strategic Creation of IoT Solution Opportunities

Abstract

With the rise of Internet of Things (IoT), companies are now facing new challenges such as diverse consumer demands and shorter lifecycle of products and services. Even in big companies, they may have to "extract" new products every six months or less. Nonetheless, shorter lifecycle is never a waiver for poor user satisfaction. Common to the companies that survived such disruptive changes is that they emphasized the user experience (UX) as one of the most important elements of their strategy. This explains why most product innovation processes such as user-centered design or design thinking emphasize so much on "empathizing." Developing a new product or service from scratch, however, is challenging especially when the underlying technology is new to people. The aim of this study is to develop a systematic process for creating opportunities from the UX perspective. This study suggests opportunity-creation process by adopting an "abductive" design thinking approach: (1) future envisioning and (2) opportunity identification and analysis. A new method called MORF-Vision (Morphological Future Envisioning) was developed to generate prospective scenarios that can be used in phase (2) to identify potential opportunities. An experiment showed that the MORF-Vision method is helpful to create opportunities in various business domains.