What’s New at the IIC
We have much to report since the last Journal of Innovation edition, but we also look with an
excited eye to October when we will launch a public resource that will arm the world with new
tools in the IIoT strategic arsenal. The experience and expertise of our members are captured
and evolving in our foundational documents, testbeds, toolkits, demos and relationships with
standards and industry groups around the world and most of this is published on our website. In
October, we will launch a new interface to that library of knowledge, making it easy to find the
resources we have developed and forge the paths from requirements to results, testing to
commercialization, from architectures to standards, from evaluations to new business models
and from on-line resources to IIoT experts. To leverage this library of knowledge, we will
introduce a web-based toolkit to analyze and strategically plan your IIoT projects.
So you may see why we are excited! More information will be announced as we prepare for the
launch at IoT Solutions World Congress (16-18 October) in Barcelona, Spain. To subscribe to the
IIC newsletter, offering updates and opportunities to engage, please send an email to
[email protected] with “Subscribe” as the subject line.
Delving into the Industrial Internet Ecosystem
By Stephen Mellor & Cheryl Rocheleau
Ecosystems come in various sizes; they may be as small as a grove of trees or as large as a 23M
acre boreal forest in Finland. Speaking of Finland, the IIC held its 2018 second-quarter member
meeting May 21-24 in Helsinki, Finland. It was as busy and productive as usual, with 30 testbed
sessions and 68 other sessions. The Ecosystem Task Group organized a successful business-to-
business connection event called ‘IIC Connect’ that attracted 53 participants and resulted in 72
interactive sessions. Each session involves twenty-minute of networking between members to
allow members to work together to find partnerships that fill gaps in their own offerings and to
expand possibilities.
T HE E XTERNAL E COSYSTEM & THE C RITICAL R OLE OF L IAISONS
Establishing universal interoperability in the Industrial IoT (IIoT) is a prerequisite for its
proliferation. Unfortunately, ensuring interoperability is a complex endeavor. It is not a matter
of agreeing on a small set of standards to rule the IIoT world, but about carefully orchestrating
complex and partially competing protocols and standards on multiple levels. No single
organization can deliver the one standard that solves all interoperability problems. You need an
ecosystem to facilitate rapid discovery and development of the partnerships you need.
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