When did you hear first of IoT? In what context was that?
2011, a ‘visionary’ consultant came to our university (Politecnico di Milano) and suggested us to launch a new line of research on IoT. I’m a management engineer, and we start to discuss with our colleagues of the informatics&electronics department to figure out what we could do. Starting from that suggestion, we launched a permanent research initiative (what we call “internet of things observatory”) that is still active and fully successful! We started with the collaboration of a few companies (10) and now we have more that 50 companies joining and supporting the research!
Did you think it was something big then or just another technology?
We understood it was something big. Starting from that time, we tried to explain to companies that it would have been another revolution, but we had to “wait” some years before most of them could realize it (let’s say, starting from around 2015). And that they can not face this revolution “alone”, ecosystems are of fundamental importance
What were your dreams, hopes for it once you realised how big it was going to be?
Our hope, as a research group, was to be able to make companies understand the disruptive impact of IoT, since this can increase the competitiveness of companies and of the country. In this regards, we worked a lot (and we’re still working) on the business implications of IoT in different industries and contexts.