On September 3, Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission and Commissionaire for the Digital Agenda wrote in her blog (http://ec.europa.eu/commission_2010-2014/kroes/en/blog/campus-party-2013...): 

“I was delighted to launch today a new important resource for startup innovation: the Future Internet labs.  Our research on the Future Internet has been going some time – and recently announced €100 million for startups. And this week it was great to launch a new resource – a "lab" offering up the "building blocks" for tomorrow's innovative ideas. Those building blocks are now available for free, and startups – or indeed anyone – from all over Europe can now get their hands on them, and use them to stimulate innovations in sectors from healthcare to transport, media to manufacturing. That's something I know Europe's entrepreneurs can really use – so I hope many of them will do so. Try it out!”

What Neelie Kroes announced in front of 10.000 developers was successfully tested by many of them. So, it is real, and it is a major result brought by European players for European competitiveness. 
However, this work will only be useful if the results created so far, and those that will come in the next months, follow the right path towards the market, it is to say, if all these efforts are translated into economic growth and jobs. This entails activities such as suitable promotion and marketing campaigns, market positioning but also engagement with users, developers, entrepreneurs and infrastructures. The challenge is very ambitious. Many steps towards that goal have been taken, but a lot of work is still needed.

The Future Internet Lab (FI-Lab) is one of the jewels of the programme, but many other jewels add to the list of valuable results within the domain of Future Internet.  The effort to identify the needs of different vertical markets in Europe and the ability to satisfy those needs is reflected by the so called Use Cases.  They have engaged with potential customers in industries of great value for Europe, such as Energy, Manufacturing, Media, Health, logistics or Agri-food.

This session will present the opportunities offered by FI-LAB and the FI PPP ecosystem to the whole FIA community, will provide clear guidance on how to use the available infrastructures for innovation from diverse points of view (not only technical) and will discuss about relevant requirements towards demonstration and test-beds in Europe/globally in order to further enrich the current ecosystem.
The session will bring together industrial experts from FI-LAB, experimentation infrastructures in Europe, and the different domains involved in the FI PPP.  They will offer preliminary lessons learned on how the full take-up of these technologies and new paradigms could inspire and set an alternative path towards new forms of business innovation ideation and adoption, new means to support and foster web entrepreneurship, new forms of participative social collaboration and new types of business relationships, realizing new forms of enterprises and new business ecosystems.

The session will be structured around two panels (see details below), each of them addressing particular aspects and questions of interest.

The first one will focus on the opportunities provided by the FI-LAB ecosystem and experimentation infrastructures, and will answer questions like:

• What kind of applications can be created on top of FI-LAB? The session will show examples of real applications created by developers along a series of hackathons organized by FI-WARE. Some references can be found in Campus Party London (September 2013) and the Future Internet event recently held in Santander (October 2013). Attendees will see that the only limit to create their applications is their imagination.
• If I want to use FI-LAB, what should I do? What kind of technical support can I get? Which training should I follow? Practical information will be provided to attendees to make “their way to FI-LAB” extremely easy
• How can I get access to valuable data for my applications? How can I relate to physical infrastructure? Is there a way to relate my application to smart cities in Europe? Attendees will discover how rich the FI-LAB environment has become in the last months. Many smart cities have been connected to FI-LAB and you, as developer, can already benefit from real data coming from city sensors and Open Data initiatives. 
• Does this refer to a specific country? What is the situation at European level? Which infrastructures are already available? What kind of support can I get according to different countries? A complete map of physical and virtual infrastructures will be provided at the session with clear information on all the resources you can build upon.

The second will extend the discussion to the experience of bringing application platforms built on top of FI-WARE technology to real settings in different industrial domains, including Manufacturing, energy, media, agri-food and logistics,healthcare etc. Questions that will get an answer in this part of the session include, but are not restricted to:

• What kind of Innovation can the FI-PPP promote in European Enterprises? just technology push innovation?
• What can be the role of FI-PPP to innovate the public sector and avoid forms of digital divide in Europe?
• What are the key features behind a reference digital business innovation methodology to accelerate FI-based sustainable product and service innovation for SMEs and web-entrepreneurship?
• How to impact our society by technological excellence and simultaneously enhancing competitiveness and STEEP (Social, Technological, Economical, Environmental and Political) sustainability?
• How do we see the future of the FI-PPP after its conclusion and what are the main business-social-political-legislative barriers to be removed to make it a real and competitive “European Service Platform”?

The session will provide information about additional resources for research, business and education within the domain through agreements with other players/programs/initiatives like ICT Labs and will open the discussion about requirements that should be fulfilled in the future (including but not limited to requirements that may have not been met so far and new ones arising from the experience gained in the last months).