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Realizing hockey stick curves

In Blog by Robert Brunbäck on 14 December 2011

1 Comment

Visiting M2M World Europe in London I made a couple of interesting conclusions. Increasingly manufacturers like Jaguar Land Rover, KIA and Volvo are talking about the end user service, end user digital interface and most of all the end user value as opposed to before where more of the technology solution was in focus.

Of course this is a quite natural progress in a heavily technology driven environment where there always will be a component of technology push in the early days. As always one of the topics discussed during the conference was, if and how, M2M as such will live up to the analyst predictions of extreme growth the coming 10 years. In contrast to the analyst predictions of the future, Volvo showed a hockey stick curve based on real up-take of the OnCall system that can be bought as an option to Volvo cars. The interesting part was that the hockey stick effect came when Volvo launched a suite of features such as remote heater start, remote door un-lock/lock, find my car (in a large parking lot) and more. Everything nicely packaged and accessible as a smartphone app. Essentially this is quite basic services, based on the same technology solution but suddenly people can relate to the service, it is easy to understand and they can show it to their friends.

In effect, not only does this make it easier for the car dealer sales guys to promote the service but it also means that the Volvo customer is doing much of the promotion and sales! Just because the value of a warm car (remotely started from my smartphone) is high, understandable and move the focus away from the techy side of M2M to a tangible service easily accessible from my smart phone. I believe that in order to create real mass market update for M2M this type of consumer pull effects is vital…

So what can we learn? I think that it is obvious that the whole industry needs to further focus on the end-user services and step away from the more technical approach that is still quite common. One first step for the telco industry is to scrap the acronym of M2M which is techy, hard to understand and not really applicable to the end-user value. Please could someone come up with something better?

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About the author

Robert Brunbäck has extensive experience in large-scale M2M deployments, product development and go-to-market strategies on a global scene. Robert resides in Gothenburg, Sweden.

  • Fredrik Akerlind

    Great post Robert. I think this is touching on our main challenge. If we look at eHealth as an example, it is very wasy to understand and grasp the benefits made possible with wirelessly connected glucose meters, Alzheimer tracking devices etc. The key to success is really how to create the correct go-to-market strategy. Today, the healthcare industry is suffering from impatient investors, often resulting in postponed, or in worst case, alltogether cancelled projects related to our business. Ideas are “over sold”, promising pay-back at a much faster rate than possible, so regardless of the end result, there will more often than not be disappointments and withdrawn funds. This is where experience that the people of Telenor Connexion can play a huge role. I think we can work even closer with success stories that can be applied over a large number of opportunities and even across verticals, to “help” our future customers by demonstrating examples like the On-Call from Volvo.

    Thanks Robert!

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