From Event 32: moving IoT R&D past the pilot

R&D work tends to look tidy in a project plan. The hard part starts when the system meets a customer, a physical environment, a budget and a deadline at the same time.

IoT Belfast 32 brought three versions of that problem into the same room. ANGOKA discussed the gap between prototype work and industrial readiness. BT Ireland Innovation Centre looked at moving IoT devices such as drones, robots and autonomous vehicles, where orchestration and resilience matter at scale. Oxford Instruments Andor brought the perspective of scientific instruments and the software that turns captured data into useful insight.

The common thread was deployment discipline. A prototype can tolerate manual steps, fragile integrations and expert supervision. A product cannot assume the original research team will be standing beside it every time something changes.

That is why commercialisation and engineering are difficult to separate in connected products. Support, update paths, data quality, security and the cost of operating the system become part of the design long before the first large deployment.

The archive page for Event 32 has the speaker and talk details for anyone who wants to trace the discussion back to the session.