Due to the increasing digitization of products, the product is moving more and more into the background for the customer. The customer experience or solution is no longer generated by the product alone, but from the interaction of software, E/E and hardware as well as own solutions and solutions from other companies. Software is the main driver of innovation and differentiation. This is the reason for the current, enormous changes towards more software-centric R&D organizations.

This means changes in the way products are developed, in the speed of product updates that customers expect, in the skills required, and even in the development of new business models. At this year’s Munich Expert Forum we would like to share and discuss practices for successful development of software-centric products as well as the necessary changes for R&D organizations.

The following key questions were the focus of the keynote speeches and discussions at our expert forum:

• What challenges do today’s R&Ds face in developing software-centric products?
• How can the software (SW) be decoupled from the hardware (HW) in the architecture in the best possible way?
• How can a SW-centric development process look like that also ensures synchronization and integration of HW, E/E and SW?
• How can agile SW development be reconciled with the classic hardware & E/E development of safety-critical systems?
• What are success patterns and solution approaches in the design of software-centric R&D (processes, methods, tools)?
• What is important to pay attention to during the transformation?

The participants of the expert forum consisted of selected experts from various industries, the event language was English.

You can find the results on our Summary Card: