Internet of Things: Smart Present or Smart Future?

Academics, practitioners and governments are paying growing attention to the Internet of Things paradigm, and to its potential impact on companies, public administrations and society. However, there is still little clarity on the state of the art of IoT applications, the benefits enabled and the expected market evolution. This paper aims to provide a contribution in this sense by presenting a classification of the main application fields and a structured methodology to measure how much current projects are close to the IoT paradigm. Then, the proposed metric is applied to 165 IoT projects launched in Italy in recent years, thus providing a detailed picture of the Italian application scenario.