Exploring Product Development of Cyber-Physical Systems in Startups: A Status Quo Study

In the interconnected world of today, we experience the evolution of mechatronic systems into cyber-physical systems (CPS) through their connection to the Internet of Things (IoT). Despite their vast potential for groundbreaking applications already present, e. g. autonomous cars or smart production systems, startups face significant hurdles in developing CPS, primarily due to limited knowledge and resources. Currently, only few scientific contributions cover how hardware-containing products are developed in startups and what possible challenges can be expected. This gap highlights a pressing need for research into the specific challenges and methodologies of CPS development within the startup ecosystem. The research goal of this paper is to set an explorative foundation for understanding the product development of CPS in startups to enable further research and suiting support for future founders. This paper offers a first attempt to give a qualitative description of the status quo of the development of CPS in startups. It begins by establishing an understanding of the four main problem fields discussed in the literature on CPS development, entrepreneurship, and hardware development in startups: The impetus of entrepreneurs in CPS-developing startups (1), the ideation of the CPS in development (2), the prototyping of CPS in startups (3) and processes, methods, and tools used in CPS development in startups (4). They are discussed by semi-structured interviews. Due to the limited number of possible participants, the interviews are conducted with a sample of eight founders and employees from CPS-developing startups in Southern Germany. Their answers are used to deduce recurring patterns and contradicting positions in their subjective experience with CPS development. The result of this paper are twelve proposed characteristic aspects of current CPS development practice in startups based on the deduced patterns. With this first qualitative description of the status quo of CPS development, this paper identifies potentially relevant topics that occupy CPS founders, delivers connecting points to current research in established research disciplines and reveals current missing research activities.