IoTUK Ten Years Later: Successes, Failures and Lessons for Future Innovation Programmes

Nearly ten years after the government-backed IoTUK programme began, enough time has passed to separate its original promises from its lasting impact. Where did taxpayer funding create something useful? Which organisations, businesses and capabilities survived? Where did apparently successful pilots fail to become permanent services, and what should the next national technology programme do differently?

Government innovation programmes are easy to praise while they are running. Announcements focus on investment, partnerships, jobs, demonstrators and the size of the opportunity. The more difficult assessment comes years later, when the launch events have been forgotten and the original websites are disappearing from search results.

IoTUK is particularly interesting because it appeared at a pivotal moment. In 2015, the Internet of Things was still presented as a new economic category. Smart cities, connected healthcare and sensor-driven public services were expected to transform everyday life. Industrial telemetry and machine-to-machine communications already existed, but the wider institutional language of IoT was only beginning to take hold.

IoTUK attempted to turn that excitement into a national research and innovation programme. It supported the CityVerve smart-city demonstrator in Manchester, two health and social-care test beds, the PETRAS cybersecurity research hub, Catapult-led ecosystem activity and two startup accelerator schemes.

Some of that work created enduring capability. Some produced useful lessons without producing lasting services. Some appears, with the benefit of hindsight, to have been weakened by fragmented governance, short-term funding and the familiar public-sector preference for pilots over long-term operation.

The Question Is Not Whether Every Pilot Survived

It would be easy to assess IoTUK by finding out how many CityVerve sensors remain in operation or whether every health application became an NHS service. That would also be too simplistic.

Public innovation funding can create several different types of value. A project may produce a commercially successful company. It may create research expertise, standards, procurement experience or policy knowledge. It may prove that an application is viable. Equally usefully, it may reveal that an attractive idea is too expensive, too difficult to operate or too poorly aligned with user needs to justify wider deployment.

The fair question is therefore not:

It is:

This is also the standard against which IoTUK asked to be judged. Its official evaluation considered whether it demonstrated economically viable applications, encouraged scaling and replication, supported business growth, influenced stakeholders and enabled knowledge to be shared across projects.

The Money Story: From Ambition to Revised Delivery

The original programme business case envisaged expenditure of approximately £40.25 million. This was to be divided across CityVerve, NHS test beds, PETRAS, Catapult activity and accelerator schemes.

The final structure was different. Changes in departmental responsibility and decisions made during the programme reduced and redistributed expenditure. The official interim evaluation recorded an aggregate public cash contribution of approximately £30 million.

The difference between the original business case and delivered expenditure does not automatically represent waste. Money that was never spent is not money lost. However, the changes matter because they altered the balance of the programme.

The accelerator schemes, in particular, became much smaller than the original allocation suggested. That reduced the programme’s ability to produce a large portfolio of commercially successful IoT companies, even though commercialisation was one of its strategic ambitions.

The official evaluation nevertheless concluded that much of the supported activity would not have happened at all, or would not have happened at the same scale and speed, without IoTUK.

The Central Test: Was IoTUK Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts?

IoTUK was not merely a label attached to unrelated projects. The central programme was supposed to connect those projects, amplify their work and encourage knowledge sharing.

That was the logic for funding central activity through Digital Catapult and Future Cities Catapult. A health project should, in theory, have been able to learn from PETRAS security research. Startups should have gained access to demonstrators. City authorities should have learned from common procurement and data-governance experience.

On this measure, the official evaluation was unusually direct.

The evaluation also found little evidence that programme-level coordination added value to delivery and identified the sharing of learning across projects as the weakest area of progress.

This does not mean the individual projects failed. It means that successful project-level activity did not consistently become programme-level value.

That distinction is crucial. IoTUK funded several strong components, but the connective tissue between them was weaker than the programme intended.

Success One: PETRAS Created a Lasting National Capability

PETRAS is the strongest evidence that IoTUK produced enduring value.

The name originally represented six research themes: Privacy, Ethics, Trust, Reliability, Acceptability and Security. The hub brought leading universities together to examine the security and social implications of connected systems.

This was less visually dramatic than a smart bus stop or a connected health device, but it addressed the issue most likely to determine whether IoT could be trusted at scale.

A connected device is not secure simply because its radio traffic is encrypted. Its complete lifecycle includes hardware, firmware, cloud services, credentials, update mechanisms, data handling, user behaviour and the organisations responsible for responding to vulnerabilities.

PETRAS treated IoT security as a socio-technical problem rather than one network setting.

What survived?

The original research activity expanded beyond its initial university group, developed into the PETRAS National Centre of Excellence for IoT Systems Cybersecurity and received further public and partner support after the original IoTUK funding period.

PETRAS-backed research contributed to secure-by-design thinking, consumer IoT security work, cyber-physical resilience and the study of connected critical infrastructure. Later phases expanded into edge computing, artificial intelligence and systems operating at the periphery of networks.

Although the later PETRAS programme formally concluded in 2024, the research, people, funded projects, policy contributions and institutional networks did not vanish with the centre’s closing date.

Why this represented good public value

• The capability lasted beyond the original programme.
• It expanded to involve more institutions and partners.
• It contributed to government thinking and security policy.
• It addressed an issue that became more important as IoT adoption grew.
• It trained researchers and created expertise that could move into industry and future programmes.

Success Two: CityVerve Created Real Institutional Learning

CityVerve was the programme’s flagship smart-city demonstrator. It brought Manchester City Council, the University of Manchester, Cisco, BT, Transport for Greater Manchester, Ordnance Survey, SMEs and other organisations into a large consortium.

The project explored applications across transport, energy, health, culture and the urban environment. Examples included connected bus-stop infrastructure, environmental sensing, transport applications and work involving energy and building management.

It is difficult to identify a single financial return from CityVerve. That does not mean it produced none.

Procurement experience was a real output

Before a city can operate connected infrastructure, it must learn how to specify, buy and manage it. That requires decisions about communications, sensor ownership, data platforms, cybersecurity, maintenance, interoperability and responsibility after installation.

A large demonstrator forced participating organisations to confront those questions in practice.

The experience informed later digital and innovation activity in Greater Manchester. Subsequent programmes involving urban data, 5G, cybersecurity and smart infrastructure did not begin from a blank sheet of paper.

The Manchester ecosystem continued

The University of Manchester later described new urban-observatory investment as building on the successes of CityVerve and other smart-city projects. Greater Manchester also continued to present digital innovation as part of its regional strategy.

That is a meaningful legacy, even where individual devices or applications did not become permanent city-wide services.

Success Three: Some Participating Businesses Continued and Grew

IoTUK did not create a widely recognised generation of billion-pound IoT companies. However, some businesses associated with its ecosystem remained active and continued applying connected technology commercially.

These examples should not be exaggerated. Public innovation programmes often include businesses that were already capable and would probably have grown anyway. Attribution is difficult.

The defensible claim is that participation can accelerate access to expertise, reference deployments, partners and institutional customers. It cannot guarantee that every supported company will survive or become globally significant.

Success Four: IoTUK Legitimised Connected Technology for Institutional Buyers

In 2015, IoT was still easy to dismiss as marketing language. Public discussion often centred on smart kettles, connected fridges and consumer gadgets.

IoTUK placed the subject in front of organisations that could affect national adoption:

• local authorities;
• NHS organisations;
• universities;
• transport bodies;
• major technology companies;
• investors and startups;
• government departments.

The programme gave public bodies permission to treat connected systems as a serious infrastructure and service-design issue.

Its evaluation found that IoTUK increased the profile of IoT technologies, particularly among participating organisations, localities and wider stakeholders.

That may sound like a soft outcome, but innovation adoption often begins with institutional confidence. Procurement teams, service managers and senior decision-makers must understand a technology well enough to consider buying it.

Success Five: It Helped Move Security Earlier in the Conversation

One of IoTUK’s better strategic choices was to fund security and trust research alongside demonstrators rather than waiting for large deployments to reveal systemic problems.

During the following decade, insecure consumer devices, default passwords, weak update processes and abandoned cloud services became major concerns. The UK subsequently developed secure-by-design guidance and legislation governing consumer connectable products.

It would be inaccurate to claim that IoTUK alone produced these policies. It is reasonable to say that PETRAS and the wider programme contributed research expertise and helped establish security as a foundational IoT issue.

This is precisely the type of indirect public value that becomes visible only years later.

Failure One: IoTUK Funded Pilots More Easily Than Operations

The most obvious weakness was not that the demonstrators failed technically. It was that programme structures were better suited to creating pilots than funding permanent services.

A two-year demonstrator can install sensors, connect devices and produce a dashboard. A ten-year service requires:

• maintenance and replacement budgets;
• ongoing connectivity charges;
• security updates;
• technical support;
• procurement ownership;
• staff who act on the information;
• a plan for supplier or platform failure;
• evidence of continuing financial or social value.

These are less visually impressive than a launch event, but they determine whether a project becomes infrastructure.

CityVerve generated useful applications and learning, but the programme did not provide an equivalent national mechanism for taking every successful demonstrator into long-term operation.

Failure Two: The Health Test Beds Were Difficult to Evaluate and Scale

The two health and social-care test beds addressed dementia support in Surrey and diabetes management in the West of England.

These were worthwhile areas. Connected care can help people remain independent, provide earlier warning of changes and support management of long-term conditions.

Healthcare is also one of the hardest environments in which to turn a technical demonstration into a permanent service.

A connected health system must fit clinical workflows, protect sensitive information, be accessible to patients, avoid creating excessive false alarms and prove that its benefits justify changes to existing services.

The interim evaluation occurred before the full long-term effects could be established. Delivery delays meant that some activity was only reaching later stages as evaluation work was taking place.

It would therefore be unfair to declare the health projects worthless. It is equally difficult to point to a national NHS service that clearly emerged from the IoTUK investment and produced a measurable financial return.

This places the health test beds in the category of valuable but unresolved: useful learning, socially important applications and uncertain evidence of lasting scale.

Failure Three: Central Coordination Added Too Little

This was the clearest weakness identified by the programme’s own evaluator.

The conceptual case for one coordinated programme was sound. The practical delivery did not consistently produce the expected cross-project benefits.

Projects were managed locally. They had different sponsors, delivery models, participants and timescales. A central board met periodically, while the Catapults attempted to provide communications and collaboration.

The evaluation found inconsistent understanding of programme aims and limited buy-in beyond participants’ parent projects. Efforts to promote cross-project learning had limited impact.

In effect, IoTUK sometimes operated as a portfolio of funded projects rather than one national programme.

This matters because central programme costs are justified only when they produce value that the projects could not have produced independently.

Failure Four: The Accelerator Ambition Was Substantially Reduced

Commercialisation was supposed to be an important part of IoTUK, yet the accelerator workstream received far less expenditure than originally planned.

Two schemes delivered by R/GA and Startupbootcamp supported 18 businesses, with nine companies in each cohort.

That activity may have been valuable to participants, but it was modest relative to the original ambition. A three-month programme can help with product design, branding, investor access and business-model development. It cannot create a national hardware and IoT scale-up sector by itself.

The reduced expenditure also affected the odds of producing visible commercial winners. Supporting 18 companies creates fewer opportunities for major outcomes than a broader multi-year programme.

There is another lesson here. Hardware and connected-product businesses typically need patient capital, manufacturing support, certification expertise, supply-chain resilience and long-term customer access. A short accelerator is useful, but it addresses only part of the problem.

Failure Five: IoTUK’s Public Identity Disappeared Too Quickly

Ask many engineers working in IoT today what IoTUK was and the answer may be uncertainty.

That is surprising for a national programme costing tens of millions of pounds.

Its institutional legacy became distributed across PETRAS, Digital Catapult, Connected Places Catapult, universities, local authorities, companies and later programmes. However, there was no enduring public record that clearly connected all those outcomes back to IoTUK.

Government programme websites are frequently archived or reorganised. Project pages disappear. Staff move roles. Reports remain online as PDFs but become difficult for general readers to discover or interpret.

This weakens public accountability and causes future programmes to repeat work because institutional learning is hard to find.

Failure Six: Technology Moved Faster Than the Programme

IoTUK was designed around the technology priorities of 2014 and 2015. Cloud platforms, LPWAN, smart-city sensors and connected health demonstrations were at the centre of the conversation.

The market then moved rapidly towards:

• industrial edge computing;
• containerised applications using Docker;
• local processing with Node-RED and MQTT;
• private 4G and 5G networks;
• edge artificial intelligence;
• eSIM and remote profile management;
• satellite and non-terrestrial connectivity;
• secure software lifecycle management;
• digital twins and operational-technology integration.

This was not a mistake unique to IoTUK. Fixed-term government programmes are normally designed, approved and procured slowly relative to commercial technology cycles.

By the time a three-year programme has established governance and begun delivery, the market may already be asking different questions.

The lesson is not to avoid long-term programmes. It is to build in mechanisms that allow technical priorities to change without dismantling the entire funding structure.

The Political Names Around IoTUK

Several ministers passed through the relevant departments while IoTUK was being conceived and delivered.

Ed Vaizey served as Minister of State for Culture and the Digital Economy during the programme’s formative period. Matt Hancock became Minister of State for Digital and Culture in 2016 and was in office during significant CityVerve and IoTUK delivery activity.

Hancock later became Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport and then Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, becoming one of the most recognisable British political figures during the COVID-19 pandemic.

His later prominence makes his connection with the programme historically interesting, particularly because IoTUK combined digital infrastructure, data, connected healthcare and technology security, subjects that became increasingly important during his later ministerial career.

However, IoTUK should not be treated as the creation of one politician. It crossed departments, agencies, ministerial changes and delivery organisations. That complexity was part of both its reach and its governance problem.

Where Did Taxpayers Get the Strongest Value?

The Innovation Pyramid: How Public Funding Creates Value

Government technology programmes tend to create value at four levels.

IoTUK performed strongly at the bottom two layers. It funded substantial activity and produced demonstrators, research and learning.

It also created value at the lasting-capability layer, particularly through PETRAS and institutional experience.

The evidence is weaker at the top. There is no clear portfolio of major global businesses whose success can be directly attributed to IoTUK.

That does not make the investment a failure. It does mean claims about commercial transformation should be modest.

A Balanced IoTUK Scorecard

Was Any of the Money Wasted?

Yes, almost certainly, in the ordinary sense that not every activity produced lasting value and some programme expenditure will have supported pilots, meetings, coordination and applications that did not continue.

That conclusion applies to almost every research, business-support or innovation portfolio. The existence of unsuccessful projects is not by itself evidence that the programme was badly designed. Innovation funding is supposed to accept risks that conventional procurement or private finance may not accept.

The more useful distinction is between three types of apparent failure.

Productive failure

A project demonstrates that an application is technically possible but operationally uneconomic. It produces evidence that prevents larger sums being spent later. That is learning, not necessarily waste.

Uncaptured value

A project creates skills, partnerships or data, but the programme fails to record and disseminate them. The underlying activity may be useful, but public value is reduced because others cannot find or reuse the learning.

Avoidable programme failure

Money is spent on coordination that does not meaningfully connect projects, or on demonstrations without a credible route to operation. This is the area in which criticism of IoTUK is strongest.

What Should a Future Innovation Programme Learn?

If IoTUK Started Again in 2026

A new national IoT programme should not begin by asking whether ordinary objects can be connected. That question has already been answered.

It would need to address a harder generation of problems.

The central question in 2015 was:

The equivalent question today is:

That change captures how far the market has progressed. It also shows why the lessons from IoTUK remain relevant.

Final Verdict: Success, Failure or Something in Between?

IoTUK succeeded where it created capability that could survive the programme.

PETRAS is the clearest example. Its research network, projects and policy influence extended beyond the original funding period. CityVerve created valuable institutional experience and helped strengthen Manchester’s position as a location for later smart-city and digital-infrastructure work. Some participating companies remained active and continued applying connected technology commercially.

IoTUK was weaker where temporary projects were expected to become permanent services without an equally strong operational funding model. The health test beds were difficult to evaluate at scale. The accelerators were much smaller than originally planned. Programme-wide coordination failed to produce enough additional value, according to the official evaluation.

It would therefore be wrong to present IoTUK either as an unqualified triumph or a wasteful failure.

It was a mixed but valuable innovation programme whose strongest legacy came from research, knowledge and institutional confidence rather than from the most visible sensors and demonstrations.

A decade later, that may be the most useful answer to the question of whether IoTUK succeeded.

It helped Britain learn how to think seriously about connected technology. The next programme must show that Britain has also learned how to keep connected systems working after the funding announcement, launch event and pilot phase are over.

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