Key lessons from IoT Week 2019

Since 2012, the IoT Week has been an annual event on the agenda of the European R&D community. Initially set up as a gathering to exchange views and outcomes from different EU funded IoT projects, the event has evolved into an exciting blend of cutting-edge research meets business and now increasingly technology adopters.

This year’s event in Aarhus has been the best ever, attracting more than 1,700 IoT enthusiasts and the curious. I was impressed by the professional organisation, Danish hospitality and the diversity of the crowd who all came together to share knowledge and insights, and to learn from each other in arguably one of the most impact technology areas for our society.

While there were hundreds of exciting ideas and impressions that I came across, here are three key lessons that I have learned from this year’s IoT Week:

1. IoT events are not yet dead — despite a large number of competing events and the lack of hype surrounding the technology, IoT Week has more than doubled its audience compared to last year’s event in Bilbao. It seems that IoT has finally left the valley of disillusionment. Many of the new faces were potential adopters or people from non-technical fields eager to learn about recent advances and opportunities in this growing market. There was also increased participation of international participants on the market.
2. Technology is not all that matters any more — the discussions were dominated by many softer topics that go along with IoT technology adoption. Ecosystem building, interoperability, trust, as well as legal and regulatory considerations have now become the new centre of attention.
3. The European IoT large scale pilots are creating market traction — with hundreds of use cases piloted across Europe, there is a common IoT technology base in diverse market sectors such as agriculture, smart cities, assisted living and autonomous driving. We are finally seeing the creation of valuable case studies that will give us the long needed tools to convince potential adopters to join in. This will help the IoT market gain sufficient critical mass to transition from early adopters to an initial early majority in the technology adoption cycle, making IoT a common ICT technology building block of an organisation’s IT infrastructure.

With so much positivity and energy that I was able to take home from Denmark, I am already looking forward to the next year’s IoT Week and to a year that will see more organisations make the transition from smaller IoT pilots to more scalable technology rollouts across their organisations.