BU Research Blog

The Technology Strategy Board is investing up to £4m in a competition to stimulate development of an open application and services ecosystem in the Internet of Things (IoT).

The Internet of Things – the trend for environments and objects to become more connected and to have more information associated with them – has the potential to stimulate large scale investment, create jobs and bring substantial economic growth. The number of connected objects is estimated to reach 50 billion by 2020, and the potential added value of services using the Internet of Things is likely to be counted in hundreds of billions of pounds a year, with new business models, applications and services across different sectors of the economy.

For Phase 1 of the demonstrator TSB have allocated up to £2.4m and are awarding up to £800k each to consortia to carry out 12-month projects funded at 100% of eligible costs. A further £1.6m is available in the second phase for scaling up the demonstrator.

In Phase 1 TSB are asking consortia to develop Internet of Things clusters. The clusters can be described as real-world scenarios, which include stakeholders with problems to be solved, application developers, owners of data streams from physical ‘things’ and technology businesses who can make this data available and usable via open information hubs. These clusters will form the heart of the demonstrator, tackling interoperability by agreeing and sharing data formats and external interfaces to the information hubs, and by co-ordinating and sharing their respective data.

This is a two-stage competition covering both phases of the demonstrator and is open to any consortium. Each consortium should consist of a prime contractor working with partners as sub-contractors and will need to include use case/ problem owners, data owners, and technology organisations. It opens on

15 October 2012 and the deadline for registering is noon on 14 November 2012.

Please note the deadline for receipt of expressions of interest is noon on 21 November 2012

Full proposals must be received by noon on 30 January 2013. Applicants should expect to start their projects no later than 1 April 2013.

The RKE Operations team can help you with your application. Please direct any enquiries to RKE Ops in the first instance.