Smart Service Welt: Recommendations for the Strategic Initiative Web-based Services for Businesses. Final report.

The Smart Service Welt 2025 vision follows on from the vision of smart factories in Industrie 4.0. In the smart factory, individual customer orders determine manufacturing processes and the associated smart factory produces smart products: intelligent, networked objects, devices and machines that underpin the services provided in the Smart Service Welt. Once they have left the factory, smart products are connected via the Internet. They exchange ever-larger volumes of data during use. It could be argued that these mountains of data (big data) actually constitute the most important raw material of the 21st century.

The big data is analysed, interpreted, correlated and supplemented in order to refine it into smart data. This smart data can then be used to control, maintain and enhance smart products and services. Smart data can generate knowledge that forms the basis of new business models. In other words, big data is refined into smart data, which is then monetised through new, individually combinable smart services. In the industrial context, a smart service might, for example, involve providing compressed gas “as a service” to meet the needs of specific situations, as opposed to simply selling compressors.

In March 2015 the Smart Service Welt working group identified and presented the main medium- and long-term research requirements and actions needed to make the Smart Service Welt 2025 vision come true. The comprehensive collection of consolidated recommendations is presented in the following final report.