Barriers

It is recognised that new business models are needed to exploit IoT. Pitch-In will develop new business models to enhance collaborative endeavours.

Pitch-In is co-sponsoring the development of several such demonstrators as part of its programme of work, which can be visited and used to test and validate potential IoT applications. These are addressing real world industrial or commercial problems in collaboration with the Universities and other external agencies.

Pitch-In will be developing various demonstrator projects. We will use these to explore issues of costs of analysis and operational costs (e.g. arising due to storage and processing in the cloud).

Pitch-In is not intended as a direct funder for IoT implementation or for fundamental IoT related research. It is concerned with supporting investigation of barriers to successful introduction of IoT, developing solutions and sharing the results. However, engineering access to other finance as part of a sustainable ecosystem is a project goal. Pitch-In will build relationships with financing as part of its ecosystem support. This includes collaboration with other Connecting Capability Fund projects such as the Northern Triangle Initiative. Pitch In is facilitating and supporting collaborative IoT related proposals as opportunities arise. The development of low cost IoT solutions is one area of significant importance to Pitch-In. We acknowledge that the needs of an SME will be different to those where major resilient infrastructure must be developed. We are supporting knowledge exchange activities to support 'IoT on a shoestring'.

Legacy systems are one of the most important issues in IoT exploitation. Although headlines may focus on developments of IoT from scratch, there is huge investment in existing systems and this cannot simply be written off. Operating and maintaining older technology alongside the new may present significant challenges, e.g. ensuring that the overall system is adequately protected from a security point of view.

Deployment of technology in a complex environment brings with it a variety of risks, e.g. The radio frequency characteristics of components in urban environments may not be straightforward to predict. For specific cases Pitch-In will develop guidance to address issues such as this.

Together with the development of sector related IoT demonstrators, Pitch-In will be developing local IoT ecosystems, building on existing trusted networks and promoting how connecting with universities can reduce the uncertainty around IoT adoption.

Pitch-In is building collaborative environments to allow testing and evaluation of technology. For example, we are co-sponsoring the development of a smart care home to help progress the exploitation of IoT in health and social care. Furthermore we are sponsoring exploratory workshops with end users to facilitate an informed understanding of what services are wanted or needed.

Pitch-In aims to build collaboration across its ecosystem partners. We are committed to continued working across the innovation pipeline. We are committed to co-creation of basic university-led research proposals (e.g. to UK Research and Innovation funding calls ) and to industry led proposals for closer to market technology and results (e.g. to Innovate UK).

Our Pitch-In ecosystem will incorporate a wide variety of skills sets and expertise. Practical data analytics will be one of these.

Our ecosystem partners inevitably must face security concerns. Security and privacy are concerns across our target sectors. We maintain both research and operational experience of security and privacy and will collaborate to address specific issues of relevance (e.g. the implications of GDPR for IoT systems in our target sectors).

Pitch-In will build an ecosystem bringing together and demonstrating who is available for collaboration and what their capabilities are. Specific mini-project collaborations will also serve to build trust between organisations. Pitch-In will also look to how to speed up the contextual aspects of collaboration such as contracting and IPR agreements.

Our ecosystem will integrate with a significant number of sector related expertise. We are developing training materials to address key aspects of IoT in our target sectors.

Pitch-In will consider collaborative agreements for resource sharing. This will include specialist software development staffing and equipment use.

We will investigate agreements for data sharing and the issues raised. This is a tricky issue since leakage may be both direct or inferred, e.g. data supplied for one purpose may allow inference with respect to another. It may not be clear what can actually be inferred and what not. We will investigate legal and ethical aspects of data sharing.

This is actually a barrier which will be addressed by many of the Connecting Capability Fund projects, not just Pitch-In. It largely refers to the actual process of secure collaboration (communications, data exchange etc) between the stakeholders. This is largely separate from issues of IoT security.

Pitch-In will facilitate cross-sector knowledge exchange both as part of its ecosystem support and as a consideration in its commissioning of mini-projects. We are focussing on four sectors (cites, energy, health and wellbeing and manufacturing). The results of our mini-projects in these areas will be assessed for cross-sector relevance. Some mini-projects will explicitly address cross-sector concerns.