A Skunk Works with tractors: Inside John Deere’s IoT-innovation unit
John Deere’s Intelligent Solutions Group is at the forefront of an IoT-based revolution in agriculture and the cutting edge of the firm’s aggressive development of technology to turn farming from an art into a science – a remarkable transformation for a company founded 180 years ago selling a self-scouring plow.
The ISG, as Deere employees generally refer to it, has been around for about 15 years, and one of its first projects was to wire the company’s machines with cellular modems. According to John Deere director of technology John Teeple, the idea was what he called an “interior-focused value proposition” – the plan would have been to collect metrics from those modems in-house to study usage patterns. Read more…