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Can the UK overcome sector fragmentation to build an ‘Internet of things’ industry?

The European Commission recently approved a plan to encourage farmers to use electronic tagging to identify cattle. This, regulators believe, will help make rearing cattle more efficient, cut fraud, and help stem the spread of diseases.

The UK’s National Beef Association welcomed the proposal, but pointed out that if the public is to benefit from the data created by electronic cattle tags, there will have to be some central repository in which to collect it.

“If [it] wants to reduce overall costs, increase efficiencies, improve real-time reporting, do away with fraud and other animal disease issues, as well as decrease bureaucracy,” NBA director Kim Haywood told the Farmers Guardian, “then the government must be prepared to invest in ... a central or UK database to achieve these benefits.”

This is just one of many cases for what is sometimes described as the ‘Internet of things’.

A broad term (even by the standards of ‘cloud computing’ and ‘big data’), it was first coined by British-born MIT researcher Kevin Ashton in 1999. Its approximate meaning today is a system for integrating the data produced by devices such as RFID tags or sensors in order to monitor, measure, manage and enhance physical objects.

Certain industries, such as defense and utilities, have been using sensor networks for decades. But the falling cost and size of electrical components, and the growing abundance of communications technologies, mean that ‘Internet of things’ – like applications are becoming viable in a broader range of industries, including city management, retail and healthcare to name but a few.

Furthermore, the value of the ‘Internet of things’ increases as more data becomes available to integrate, revealing new patterns of interconnectedness in the physical world.

All this presents an abundance of economic opportunity, and it is an opportunity that the UK is as well placed as any country to grasp. It certainly sits well with the government’s strategy of supporting high-tech manufacturing as a source of economic growth.

However, just like the conventional Internet, the ‘Internet of things’ relies on the participation of a wide range of constituents. It must involve electronics manufacturers, to make the sensors and tags; communications device makers and service providers, to link them together; data aggregation and analysis providers to help make sense of it all; and product and service designers, to make it usable to ordinary businesses and consumers.

All these exist in the UK, but they are fragmented. Collaboration between these sectors seems essential for the economic potential of the ‘Internet of things’ to be realised.

At the same time, the diversity of skills available in the UK may be what gives the country its best chance of being a bigger player in the ‘Internet of things’ than it is on the Internet.

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