Intelligent products: Agere versus Essere

The notion of an intelligent product places suitability for integration firmly on the research agenda. Indeed, this paradigm aims for coordination and integration on a scale that is unseen until today. Note that this applies particularly where it concerns the core businesses of companies. For that reason, this paper presents a novel concept, the intelligent being, as a vehicle to achieve suitability for integration. The concept is applied to intelligent product instances, intelligent product types and intelligent resources alike. The paper identifies: (1) which services and functionalities can be offered by intelligent beings, (2) what are suitable candidate intelligent beings, and what are not. The paper shows that intelligent beings can reflect a corresponding reality – a product – in its current, past and future states. It thus argues for a role of the intelligent being that is analogous to what maps contribute in navigation systems (and may become as important).