Let’s celebrate failure in Europe!

That was one of the key themes discussed during today’s “Internet of Everything – What’s in it for Europe event” in Brussels, with MEP Kaja Kallas asking the audience to consider a change in innovation culture to capture the predicted €4.3 trillion that the IoE could generate in value in Europe. Kallas coined the EU attitude to a fear of failure and failing fast compared to the US with “Silicon Valley innovates, DC litigates and Brussels investigates”.

€4.3 trillion is a big number, but we think its on the conservative side based on our engagement with public and private sectors around the world. Digital disruption fuelled by the Internet of Everything is redefining industries, cities, countries at an unprecedented rate and promises productivity and economic gains with 1.4% increase in annual GDP and with 1 million new jobs created over ten years.

Michael Hager, Head of Cabinet for Commissioner Oettinger, echoed Kallas’ sentiment on the courageousness required to capture the IoE opportunities, leveraging the Alliance for IoT Innovation (AIOTI) and the Digital Single Market (DSM) to look beyond national borders to a European and international approach. Engaging cross-sectoral collaboration and getting privacy, security and connectivity right will be key enablers.

I was struck by how much in common an enterprise like Bosch, start up AirCloak and the City of Copenhagen had – all touched on the need for vision to breakdown siloed use cases, using concrete demonstrations to illustrate value, to tackle privacy and security issues head-on and the need for education initiatives to accelerate digitisation.

So yes we can celebrate failure in Europe but we can’t afford for the policy environment to be the reason we fail. Fostering the right policy environment means getting it right on issues as diverse as an adaptable data protection framework, a partnership-based security model and the development of an IoE-savvy workforce. The Digital Single Market will bring many elements that will help take us forward, but we need more Member States to complement these efforts by putting digitisation front and centre of their accelerated national digital agendas and municipalities to embrace the opportunities.

Please click here for more information on the opportunity that digitisation fuelled by the Internet of Everything enables.