Impacts of Digital Twins: Significance from Sales Perspective

Disruptive innovations, data utilization and digital twins have received significant attention in scientific publications in recent years. Complex data-based solutions, for example digital twins, require understanding of the customer’s business and the technological solution. This paper presents a framework for understanding the impacts of digital twins and discusses the sales perspective based on the interview findings. The qualitative interview data included altogether 16 semi-structured interviews from six case companies from the areas of intelligent machine control systems, software solutions, real-time simulation and machine engineering. As a result, the impact of digital twins can be classified in four categories: process change, competition environment change, role chain in value chain, and significant turning point in the market and emerging ecosystems. For example, when the impacts of complex digital twins are for the ecosystem, the importance of customer and ecosystem understanding and generated value is growing.