Realizing the Full Potential of the IoT Requires American Leadership
Samsung is playing a leading role in the national dialogue to create a policy roadmap for U.S. leadership in the IoT.
If you ask a group of friends, colleagues or family members to name the single most important innovation of the last century, I’d be willing to wager many of them would say “the internet.”
To be sure, other breakthroughs have revolutionized important industries and aspects of modern life, from the refrigerator’s effect on food and agriculture, to the automobile’s empowerment of mobility, to the television’s impact on entertainment and advertising. But few other inventions have been as radically transformative in changing the way we live, work and play on as massive a scale as the internet. And we’re still just getting started.
Almost 48 years after ARPANET was first conceived in a government laboratory, the internet is poised to make its biggest leap yet — the leap into the physical world. I’m talking about the Internet of Things (IoT), which is bringing the physical and digital worlds together to improve everything from public safety to health care to productivity and efficiency in governments and businesses alike.
As just one example of IoT’s impact, I think about the family that recently told us their elderly and ailing father with dementia, who had a potential for wandering out of the house, was able to stay safely and comfortably at home rather than moving into assisted care thanks to our Samsung SmartThings products.
This story raises a crucial point about bringing IoT to scale: Today, it’s changing individual lives. But tomorrow- if rightly deployed- it can improve the lives of millions. It also promises to create new job opportunities and stimulate growth around the world, with one recent study showing IoT can have a global economic impact of up to $11.1 trillion annually by 2025.[1]
So how do we get there?
Unleashing the full power and impact of IoT will require careful guidance and close collaboration across businesses, governments, societal leaders and — yes — industry competitors. That’s why Samsung last year teamed up with Intel and the wide-ranging membership of the Information Technology Industry Council (ITI) to establish the National IoT Strategy Dialogue (NISD), a forum where stakeholders have discussed, collaborated and worked together to develop a set of policy recommendations to guide the growth of IoT. Our model? The internet, of course.
The internet’s founders knew that a fractured, compartmentalized network with incompatible sets of technical standards, protocols and proprietary underwriting would be no internet at all. So they committed to establishing a core set of principles for prioritizing connectivity and collaboration at the outset.
Fast forward to today, and we’re at a similar crossroads with the IoT.
Over the past 18 months, Samsung and our partners in the NISD have come together to create a multi-stakeholder, cross-industry policy road map for bringing IoT to scale. We talked with a wide range of government and industry leaders, and in those conversations two things became very clear:
First, ensuring wide-scale adoption of IoT calls for continued collaboration and a focus on developing human-centric solutions from all industry players, even those who make competing products. And second, securing U.S. leadership in the global race to test, develop and deploy IoT demands a national strategy rooted in smart policy and a commitment to action on the part of Congress and the White House.
Using these insights as a foundation, the NISD came up with a broad list of recommendations for promoting interoperability, security, consistency and federal leadership to advance U.S. IoT adoption and innovation. We outlined those recommendations in a research paper released today, urging Congress and the Administration to do the following:
1. Prerequisite: Establish an IoT Definition
2. Prioritize a National IoT Strategy
3. Ensure Consistent IoT Standards and Rules at the Federal and International Levels
4. Commit to Security of the IoT
5. Prioritize “Smart” Infrastructure Solutions
6. Invest in IoT Public-Private Partnerships, Research and Testbeds
No single company or government agency can move the IoT forward alone — collaboration is essential — but Samsung is ready to contribute its unique expertise and market leadership. Our ARTIK IoT platform provides the computing power, connectivity, and end-to-end, multilayered security that the IoT demands, and it is open, interoperable, and available for IoT solution developers to tackle problems large and small.
As we introduce these recommendations, Samsung appreciates all of the public and private stakeholders who participated in the NISD. We look forward to working with them to carry out these important recommendations.
[1] “Unlocking the potential of the Internet of Things,” McKinsey Global Institute, June 2015
