Generating innovations is a must for any technological company that seriously intends to stay alive and prosper. The Internet of the Things (IoT) is a concept that involves thousands of millions of devices, and offers seemingly endless opportunities to generate innovations. IoT opens up for the establishment of new technological platforms as well as new types of ecosystems consisting of e.g. different firms, public organizations, and communities. These ecosystems constitute dynamic environments for the development of IoT technology and for generating innovations. Software is essential to foster all these innovations.

However this specific context also brings about numerous challenges. Like in many other industries, the technological life-cycles become shorter year by year, the pressure for reduced time-to-market constantly increases, and customers are becoming ever more demanding and also requires higher degrees of customization. Altogether, this increases the uncertainty associated to the innovation development process. Some particular features of IoT innovation render it particularly challenging. As IoT comprises numerous different technologies the demand for effective integration is substantial. Moreover, the development of IoT often takes place in networked ecosystems with multiple stakeholders, and this underlines the need to develop suitable business models that allow for fruitful collaboration, value generation and appropriation

In this context, software developers more and more need to attend to innovation in their development work: when developing new and attractive-to-the-customer products with the ambition to  become innovations they have to combine creativity, agility and speed to keep up. Creativity is a fundamental resource in an innovation-intensive environment, but needs to be combined with agility in order to effectively introduce flexibility in the process and make decisions to cope with uncertainty. Speed will be required to deal with intensified competition and demands for reduced time to market.

This workshop will analyze and understand the role that agility plays in generating innovations, which this far is inconclusive and even presents conflicting results. Furthermore, agility needs to be harmonized with speed for effective innovative product development in the context of the Internet of Things.

Call for participation for the workshop

The first workshop on Generating Innovations for the Internet of the Things: Agility and Speed will seek contributions that address the following questions:

• How can we characterize software-based innovations for the Internet of Things?
• How can Agile and Agility help cope with uncertainty when Generating Innovations for the Internet of the Things
• How can we make that agility and agile values and speed co-exist in the IoT context?
• How is creativity influenced by agile approaches in development?
• Can learning be better deployed for innovation in Agile?
• Does effective learning help speed up the development process?
• Are investment models similar to those of conventional projects?

The following topics are aligned with our theme:

• The role of business and the role of software and engineering practices in innovation
• Product roadmap for innovations
• Agile values and principles in innovation
• Learning in agile
• Indicators for pivoting
• Indicators for reducing the distance between products and customers
• Economic models for investment in innovative software product development
• Obstacles that slow down development speed
• Development Models based on experiments

We invite submissions of papers in any areas related to the themes and goals of the workshop in the following categories:

 1. Research Papers: describing innovative and significant original research in the field (up to 8 pages).
 2. Industrial Papers: describing industrial experience, case studies, challenges, problems, and solutions (up to 8 pages).
 3. Position and Future Trend Papers: describing ongoing research, new results, and future trends (up to 4 pages).

Submissions should be original and unpublished work. Each submitted paper will undergo a rigorous review process by three members of the program committee. Submissions must be submitted online via EasyChair and conform to ACM's general guidelines for academic publishing. Accepted papers will be presented at the workshop and published in the XP 2017 post-conference proceedings.