How can organizations unlock and demonstrate the value of digital twins to secure investment?

For many organizations, developing the business case to secure investment digital twin projects can be challenging. They know digital twins can transform operations and decision-making, but they can’t confidently answer the critical question from executives and boards: What value will this actually deliver?

Part of the difficulty lies in the nature of digital twins themselves. Value stems from a combination of tangible and intangible benefits — from improved decision-making and risk reduction to enhanced collaboration and long-term operational efficiencies. The intangible benefits are difficult to measure and often ignored by traditional ROI models that focus on quantifiable, direct financial returns. Benefits are also generated and shared across multiple processes and departments, making them harder to measure and attribute. 

Even teams that secure funding for an initial proof of concept can struggle. While early pilots show promise, it’s full-scale implementation that delivers real value.

As a result, digital twin champions often face somewhat of a paradox: they’re expected to prove value upfront to secure investment, but the full value only becomes evident once the solution is deployed at scale. 

Clients often get stuck in a “so what?” moment. They understand digital twins are powerful digital transformation tools and see their peers investing in projects but struggle to articulate return on investment to their boards and executives.

Cath Hill supports clients to navigate this paradox, working with organizations to co-define success and identify tangible and intangible benefits at every stage of the digital twin journey. Drawing on proven methodologies, industry benchmarks and practical experience on similar projects, she works with clients to build a more complete picture of value that goes beyond traditional ROI. The result is clearer understanding of how digital twins deliver impact and decision-making grounded in an informed benefit-based business case, rather than assumption or ambition alone.

Having built her career at the intersection of digital transformation, emerging technology and data-driven decision-making, Cath has a strong track record of driving innovation and delivering technology-enabled solutions. Her experience spans strategy development and delivery, data-led performance improvement, product design and management, stakeholder engagement, operating model redesign and change management. This breadth gives her a practical framework for enabling clients to answer key questions such as "What decisions will we make differently?" and "How will we measure impact?", supporting them to bridge the gap between vision and delivery.