Designing Digital Twins: Avoiding No-ROI Twins by Working Backwards from the Real World

Rob Foster, CEO of Geminum and a digital transformation pioneer, brings over 25 years of global experience in engineering, operations, and maintenance. With a decade of focus on digital twins, Rob is a leading voice in helping organizations design impactful, ROI-driven solutions. As the author of the upcoming book Designing Digital Twins, he is passionate about demystifying this transformative technology. 

In this session, Rob will shed light on the critical challenges and opportunities of digital twins. While digital twins have the potential to drive real-world transformation, many are mistakenly designed as software-only bundles of capabilities, which often lead to projects that “flame out” within 2-3 years due to low adoption and lack of measurable improvements. Rob emphasizes the importance of strong product thinking to design digital twins that create, measure, and continuously improve real-world change, ensuring organizations avoid the no-ROI trap and achieve sustainable success. 

1. Digital twins can create real-world change but are often designed as software-only bundles, lacking tangible impact. 

2. Multiple digital twin projects fail 2-3 years after inception due to low adoption and lack of measurable improvements. 

3. To avoid the no-ROI situation, digital twins require strong product thinking to ensure continuous improvement and real-world change.