New White Paper addresses key challenges for SMEs and start-ups developing IoT products and services

Research for the White Paper has been led by Dr Irina Brass, Co-Investigator in the Standards, Governance and Policy Stream in PETRAS, and Chair of the BSI IoT-1 Technical Committee.

The presentation detailed the key challenges for SMEs and start-ups developing IoT products and services as well as relevant priority areas for standardisation. The White Paper is available for download here.

The main objectives of the White Paper are:

• Identify the main opportunities and challenges that SMEs and start-ups are facing with regard to the IoT standards landscape;
• Develop use cases, validated or co-developed with SMEs and other key stakeholders to understand what these challenges are. Examples of these challenges include: sustainable product line diversification and up-scaling, ensuring interoperability with existing smart ecosystems, navigating the fragmented standards landscape, adopting and implementing existing and new IoT standards and best practices.
• Help SMEs and start-ups understand the latest developments in the standardization of IoT security, privacy, trust, interoperability.
• Identify priority areas for standardization and ways of ensuring that SMEs are taking an active role in IoT standardization.

Professor Jeremy Watson CBE FREng, PETRAS Director & Professor of Engineering Systems at UCL STEaPP, said: “The PETRAS – BSI Standards White Paper, demonstrates a successful collaboration between PETRAS and one of its key partners, BSI.  Standards play an important role in incentivising market players to responsibly develop IoT products and services, building in security, safety, privacy, data protection and interoperability. These core principles build consumer trust in IoT. The plurality and diversity of SMEs and Start-ups venturing into IoT product and service offering highlights the significance of this White Paper in capturing the opportunities, as well as challenges faced by this specific group of businesses, and factoring them into the IoT standards development processes. In a timely manner, this White Paper, identifies tired risk assessment as one of the top priorities for IoT standardisation.”

Following the release of the White Paper four candidates in the MPA in Digital Technologies and Policy at UCL STEaPP will engage in an exciting new project that will build on the findings of the paper, deepening the understanding of IoT SMEs’ needs and the role that standards can play in supporting them. The project is a collaboration between UCL STEaPP, PETRAS and BSI – the national standards body in the UK – and is an excellent example of co-produced and applied research-led education at UCL.

The work on standards for IoT SMEs and Start-ups is ongoing and expressions of interests from SMEs and start-ups, as well as consumers, to contribute to or participate in the on-going research, are always welcome.

Authors of the White Paper are Dr Irina Brass (Lecturer in Regulation, Innovation and Public Policy at UCL STEaPP and Chair of the BSI IoT-1 Technical Committee), Dr Kruakae Pothong (Research Fellow, PETRAS IoT Research Hub at UCL STEaPP) and Dr Maryam Hasham (Market Insights Analyst at BSI).

Expressions of interests and requests for further information relating to the White Paper can be directed to: sophie.erskine@bsigroup.com.

To participate and contribute to the UCL-BSI student-led research in this area, please contact Elizabeth Down at Elizabeth.down.18@ucl.ac.uk.