Five Darlings to Be Killed: Debunking Myths About Innovation in the Software-Intensive Embedded Systems Industry

Paper in proceeding, 2025

Companies need to continuously innovate to stay competitive. For every innovation, there needs to be a customer, a way to monetize and a way to validate that what is developed adds value to the customer. With digitalization, however, the approach to innovation needs to change. Instead of technology-driven approaches, companies need to adopt more customer-driven approaches to innovation. In this context, we see that companies in the software-intensive embedded systems industry adopt practices that originate in the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) domain. This has proven to be far from trivial, and these practices tend to be associated with several myths in the software-intensive embedded systems industry. In this paper, we present multi-case study research in which we identify five myths that permeate software-intensive embedded systems companies and that have become the typical representation of how these companies work, how they interact with customers and how they do business. We explore these myths referring to them as “five darlings to be killed”, and we detail what the myth is about, why it is incorrect and what happens in companies instead.