Collaboration is the key to IoT.

I see the IoT as a transformative opportunity to unite people, the planet and profits. The revolutionary advent of IoT technologies such as LoRaWAN® and other offerings for IoT connectivity enable unique business models, making it easier and more economically feasible for organizations to gather and access data. Having more insight allows organizations to profitably address some of the biggest challenges facing us today—sustainability, environment, health and safety—by increasing efficiencies and profits with highly targeted and effective solutions.

The smart city serves as an excellent example of the positive impact that IoT technologies like LoRaWAN have enabled. Smart traffic lights and smart parking improve traffic flow and reduce congestion (and quality of life!), which in turn reduces pollutants, providing a healthier environment. Smart lighting increases safety while significantly reducing energy consumption. Pest control and smart trash bins work together to provide a cleaner, safer environment, without the use of harsh chemicals or pesticides that have a negative impact on the environment.

Moving indoors, the workforce can now go to an office or manufacturing site that is safe and efficient—with monitoring that ensures good air quality, facility cleanliness, space usage, and more. Safety buttons provide peace of mind that help will be on the way with a single touch, so the housekeeper in the hotel or employee leaving the office late at night can do their jobs without worry. Utilities can be monitored to better understand usage and quickly identify leaks, with huge potential savings from preventing damage and preventing waste of resources. And the best part is that all of these use cases save municipalities, building and business owners money—which means the solution providers also profit from each deployment.

Thinking just about the smart city (which is a subset of the millions of use cases addressed by IoT), it is clear that a tremendous level of expertise is needed to bring all of these solutions together in a way that is easy to deploy, easy to use and easy to make a measurable impact. This is where organizations like the LoRa Alliance are critical to the IoT and add tremendous value not just to their own members but to businesses everywhere. They create forums of knowledge, experience, use cases, references, successes, and failures. Products become known, companies are discovered, and projects are accelerated. By developing the ecosystems regionally and worldwide and facilitating expertise sharing to create success, the IoT will continue to accelerate and grow. The open-source nature of our specific IoT technology, LoRaWAN®, means we are scaling IoT adoption collaboratively on a global scale, and anyone is welcome to join in and make it happen.

Having seen first-hand evidence of the fantastic accomplishments come to light during my tenure as a leader in the IoT, I know that by continuing to work together, we can achieve something much greater than what any one of us can do alone—and I can’t wait to witness the continued evolution of this industry and its innovators.

Donna Moore is CEO & Chairwoman of the LoRa Alliance®. In this role, she oversees the organization, its strategy and direction to drive the global adoption of the LoRaWAN® standard. Moore has nearly two decades of experience launching new companies and growing businesses across a variety of industries and competitive environments. Most recently, she was CEO of SpireSpark International, a company that provides highly skilled technical and operational expertise to design and build certification, compliance, and conformance programs. Prior to that, she served as the executive director of the Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA), where she successfully led DLNA to become the defacto IoT standard for streaming video, audio, and picture files to each other over a LAN. Under Donna’s leadership, DNLA achieved global market adoption with over 4 billion certified devices deployed worldwide. She holds a Bachelor of Science degree from San Diego State University.