Faced with a rising tide of data, business leaders need the right platforms to enable innovation and collaboration. Productive use of data is critical for companies to compete. This is the subject of a new report from Aberdeen Strategy & Research, “The Four Building Blocks to Unleashing Continuous Innovation,” which explores the role of digital twins in powering productive data use, improved decision-making and better outcomes.

This post contains excerpts from the second building block: contribution with purpose. You can also read about the first block, enabling data consumption.

Building Block 2: Contribution with purpose

The first building block to unleashing continuous innovation is enabling data consumption. One effective way of doing this is through the use of digital twins – and virtual twin experiences, which go further to pair scientifically accurate models with AI and analytics capabilities – to allow employees to access, analyze and learn from business data from the real and virtual worlds.

Once the virtual twin is in place and various departments are consuming data from it, that’s where the second building block comes in. Organizations must figure out how each department can continuously and purposefully contribute to updating their virtual twins. This requires implementing business and collaboration methods that will break down organizational silos and foster connection and collaboration enterprise-wide.

Each team makes its unique contribution. Some build the models to extrapolate data and test scenarios, and some share data about past decisions and their impact in the real world, while others add financial and supplier data and define KPIs. And it’s all contributed to the same system where engineering and authoring is happening, connecting all of the relevant information. Here, stakeholders can make sound decisions based on trustworthy and real-time KPI monitoring in the context of constantly changing engineering definitions.

Aberdeen’s research makes clear that businesses innovating with digital twins and virtual twin experiences are reaping big benefits compared to non-users:

• 25% greater year-over-year decrease in engineering change orders
• 12% increase in product return on investment
• 7% decrease in total cost per unit

Companies leveraging virtual twin experiences are better able to virtually test designs and ensure quality and manufacturability before moving into real production. As a result, they’re making fewer costly changes, improving time-to-market and reducing operating costs.

When stakeholders across the value network are making contributions with purpose, the virtual twin provides an authentic and trusted source of unified data. This drives holistic and recurring improvement for everyone, laying the groundwork for the third building block … which you can read about next time.

READ THE FULL “The Four Building Blocks to Unleashing Continuous Innovation” REPORT

Read our blog post about Building Block 1: Enabling data consumption

Learn more about NETVIBES solutions that enable organizations to gather, align and enrich Big Data by leveraging virtual twins to transform large volumes of multi-source data into meaningful, real-time information intelligence.