In the past few years, our 33 use cases have all taken important steps towards the development and implementation of innovative IoT solutions that will help further the digitalization of the agrifood sector. This progress has not gone unnoticed. Through IoF2020 we have generated a lot of attention for IoT innovations within the agrifood sector among agrifood companies from all over Europe. Next to that, the (general) ICT community has shown a lot of interest in the potential room for IoT developments that the agrifood sector has to offer. We are particularly pleased to see that so many small and medium enterprises (SME’s) from the field of ICT innovation have found their way into the project, and are now enthusiastically working on further digitalizing the agrifood sector.

Of course, IoF2020 is about more than just technological development. In order to sustain the innovations that IoF2020 facilitates, successful business development is at least as important as the innovations themselves. The attention for business development (through WP4) has resulted in the fact that many of the solutions developed through our use cases are now approaching market readiness, and some are already there.

In this newsletter we pay special attention to the High-level event that is being organized by IoF2020 and SmartAgriHubs, and to the SmartAgriHubs stakeholder event that will feature IoF2020. For these events IoF2020 will work closely together with the SmartAgriHubs (SAH) project. The results of IoF2020 form a strong basis for SAH, and we also believe that SAH can offer the IoF2020 use cases what they need for their next steps: a network of agrifood innovators that will help further develop and spread IoT developments in the years to come.

- Dr. George Beers Coordinator IoF2020