The European Alliance for Innovation, in collaboration with Fraunhofer Fokus Institute, La Sapienza University, IBM, INSME and CREATE-NET Institute organizes the Summit “IoT360: the Gateway to Innovation”, taking place in Rome, Italy on the 28th and 29th of October 2014.

IoT360 is in its first edition and focuses entirely on IoT bringing a 360 degree perspective on IoT-related projects and activities and aiming to coach involved people on the whole path between research to innovation and all the way through to commercialisation of ideas, projects and technologies.

IOT360 is a powerful and inspirational event that brings together the most influential innovators, leading technologists, researchers and entrepreneurs, industry representatives, makers, vendors, experts, developers and others to plan, learn, network, collaborate, strategize and more effectively tap into the immense potential of the IoT domain.

The Summit consists of a comprehensive 2-day event that will feature main panels covering mainly 3 different tracks:
• The Innovation track that will deal with the aspects of taking an idea to market, following through the commercialization process, from idea development all the way through funding. This track will take the participants through the basic steps of how to evaluate an idea, how to assess the IPR readiness of such idea from protection and validity and than through panel and discussions to better prepare the audience for funding readiness.
• The technology track, meant to shed more light over the actual steps taken by different people / organisations to capitalise on what the Internet of Things can deliver. In the various sessions there will be talks and discussion panels from various industry sectors representatives, gathering views on IoT innovation from big organisations and SMEs, comparing and contrasting experiences from companies selling horizontal and vertical solutions, sharing hot topics from the makers community and standardisation bodies, concluding with an overview on privacy and societal implications of IoT.
• The Community track bringing people together to network and build the internet of things.
This track is the instrument to meet people, companies and organizations. This session brings together such actors to share research plans, kick start initiatives, formulate new projects and make business. Agile one to one meetings among users facilitate a coral development of the EAI internet of things community.

The Summit offers a wide set of collateral activities such as technical scientific events covering key aspects of the IoT world, an exhibition of new technologies from startups and companies, demos of projects and workshops. The Exhibit provides an excellent opportunity for companies to showcase their business and products, researchers to present their projects and prototypes, to benefit from expert knowledge, meet and match expertise with new partners and make your way to market with the EAI support.
An EAI Expert Team will award the most qualified projects/prototypes/products by offering free EAI accelerator or Incubation programs. The EAI Acceleration & Incubation Programs are online events which provide tutoring and mentoring to monetize your technology/project, acquire the tools to lead your start up and hit the market.

In addition, the IOT360 Summit also promotes the “IOT360 Summer School” which will demonstrate what it takes to deliver an IoT-based product from scratch. the School consists of lectures and tutorials as well as a hands-on session where participant teams will be formed to work on selected projects. Lastly the IOT360 HACKATHON adresses entrepreneurs, developers, makers and designers who are willing to hands-on experiment, learn and play with state of the art technologies for the IoT and build IoT related prototypes and solutions.