Industry & Trade Association Sponsors Multiple Research Projects to Explore Smart Homes and Smart Buildings Innovation Opportunities

Smart Homes and Buildings industry trade association reached out to Harbor Research to help analyze and explore multiple emergent technology and application opportunities on behave of its member organizations which includes equipment manufacturers and property owners and managers,  as well as utilities, insurance providers and communications services providers addressing new growth opportunities across the smart home and smart buildings arena.

Our client who manages an on-going industry and market research program reached out to Harbor to gain our expertise and assistance analyzing multiple emergent technology and digital innovation growth opportunities within the smart homes and buildings sector. The primary goal of engaging Harbor was to utilize our research capabilities focused on smart systems, services and the Internet of Things (IoT).

Emergent technologies and application opportunities we have analyzed for the client include:

1. Identifying data and analytics monetization opportunities driven by new smart systems and services in commercial and institutional building applications.
2. Validating and portraying multi-dwelling unit (MDU) growth opportunities where new smart services informed by emerging IoT and related digital technologies could address this historically underserved opportunity enabling MDUs to act as a “staging area” for new services innovation.
3. Analyzing the emerging “Smart Home-as-a-Service” opportunity which is based on the rapid explosion in the number of connected power devices, security systems, smart appliances, thermostats and more in the home and the apparent annoyance that consumers experience with having to manage all of these devices due to the absence of collaborative services and architectures to drive cooperative capabilities across diverse home product manufacturers and services providers.
4. Examine how architects, developers, property owners and managers as well as equipment and services providers are addressing new energy management technologies in multiple smart building segments focusing on the utilization of device generated data to enable a whole new generation of energy management automation and systems.

Harbor’s assistance in helping our client help its constituent members gain new knowledge to help drive embracing and leveraging emergent technologies stems from our on-going research of smart systems and services technologies, both within and around the smart homes and buildings arena.

From our perspective, the intelligent homes and building systems market is poised to enter a new period of transformation based on the availability of low-cost, wireless IoT technologies and new “smart” services offered through innovative business models. These markets are experiencing a confluence of technologies including smart devices, higher performance wireless and related networking technologies, cloud computing, new IoT data platforms, and a range of new software tool and development innovations. The combination of available technology with new business architectures designed to support these new offerings has the potential to unleash a significant wave of disruption and new value in this evolving arena. Despite this promise, only companies that know how to properly address customer needs and monetize the data produced by IoT-enabled homes and buildings will emerge as winners.

Based on this view, Harbor has emphasized its user and customer field research combined with its knowledge of evolving core technologies to design each project to highlight new “applied” innovation opportunities and to convey the impacts of these opportunities to our clients members in manner that is context sensitive to each member segment specifically.

Member organizations have been able to utilize these emergent technology and market investigations and our firm’s interactions with these member organizations to identify high-value opportunities for which they are well positioned to pursue. Our analysis of emergent technologies and application opportunities has been conveyed through carefully designed frameworks that portray opportunities within an ecosystem and potential delivery partner context.  Member companies developing longer-term plans have been able to utilize our perspectives and growth opportunity analysis to make intelligent and informed investments in new technology development programs that have been introduced into the market today.