Open Access

Mario Angos Mediavilla, Vera Hummel, Beate Brenner

• The early involvement of experiences gained through intelligence and data analysis is becoming increasingly important in order to develop new products, leading to a completely different conception of product creation, development and engineering processes using the advantages that the dedication of the digital twin entails. Introducing a novel stage gate process in order to be holistically anchored in learning factories adopting idea generation and idea screening in an early stage, beta testing of first prototypes, technical implementation in real production scenarios, business analysis, market evaluation, pricing, service models as well as innovative social media portals. Corresponding product modelling in the sense of sustainability, circular economy, and data analytics forecasts the product on the market both before and after market launch with the interlinking of data interpretation nearby in real-time. The digital twin represents the link between the digital model and the digital shadow. Additionally, the connection of the digital twin with the product provides constantly updated operating status and process data as well as mapping of technical properties and real-world behaviours. A future-networking product, by embedded information technology with the ability to initiate and carry out one's own further development, is able to interact with people and environments and thus is relevant to the way of life of future generations. In today's development work for this new product creation approach, on one hand, "Werk150" is the object of the development itself and on the other hand the validation environment. In the next step, new learning modules and scenarios for trainings at master level will be derived from these findings.