Today's start-up community stands to make over £100bn from the Internet of Everything (IoE) in the next decade alone claims a new report from Cisco. To build on this opportunity and encourage more start-ups to gain from IoE Cisco is calling on businesses, government and education to develop closer partnerships.
This, believes Cisco, will help to better educate students and young entrepreneurs about the opportunities that STEM skills unlock, and position jobs in science and technology as an opportunity to engineer the future and drive innovation across the UK.
Last year the Prime Minister announced that the UK government will spend £45m developing technologies based on the Internet of Things (IoT); more recently Ofcom issued a statement that it would look to put in the appropriate regulatory framework to help the UK's IoT market flourish.
Broken down by four vertical sectors - healthcare, retail, transport and energy - the report, entitled 'The Internet of Everything: Unlocking the Opportunity for UK Start-ups', revealed that start-ups in the healthcare industry currently have the greatest opportunity, with the scope to access over £48bn over the next decade through innovations in the IoE.
The retail industry is not far behind at £37bn, with big gains also to be made in transport (£11bn) and energy (£7bn).
Businesses in all of these industries have significant opportunity to transform their respective industries by streamlining processes, removing inefficiency and creating better experiences.
The report coincides with the launch of Cisco's 2015 BIG awards, an initiative designed to reward the UK's most innovative IoE start-up digital businesses and SMEs with an investment of cash, technology and human resources.
Cisco predicts that the number of devices connected worldwide will rise from around a billion today to 50bn by 2020. But with less than 1% of the world currently connected, options for the startup community to exploit opportunities for digitalisation and connectivity are substantial.
Phil Smith, Chief Executive, Cisco UK and Ireland, said: "UK companies of every size are devoting time and ingenuity to designing and building IoE applications, from the smallest SMEs to the largest enterprises.
"These companies are not just digitising in the conventional sense but finding completely new ways to connect people, processes, data and things, from their supply chains to their office spaces and their customers.
"The UK's startup community is a great source of innovation, and we're confident that we're only witnessing the first wave. In the coming months and years we can expect these businesses to be at the forefront of the transformation of the UK economy as we fully embrace the possibilities of a digital future."