From the very start, the use cases were forced to define their economic, ecological and social impact, setting clear and ambitious key performance indicators on these three sustainability pillars. For many of these indicators significant improvements could be demonstrated by use of IoT technologies. Fostering a symbiotic ecosystem of technology providers and agri-food players, IoF2020 has contributed to secure Europe’s leading position in the global IoT industry. Significant contribution was made to development of open standards and open platforms. This has created new opportunities for entrepreneurs promoting new market openings, providing access to valuable datasets and direct interactions with users, expanding local businesses to European scale. Innovation was done in a responsible way focusing on user acceptance validation accounting for privacy, security, vulnerability, liability, user needs, -concerns and -expectations of IoT solutions. In this way it is expected to impact the European citizens' quality of life, in the public and private spheres, in terms of autonomy, convenience and comfort, participatory approaches, health and lifestyle providing more comfort for farmers, food safety traceability and environmental protection. Altogether IoF2020 contributed to a more secure, safe and adequate food for the future generations of European citizens.
The IoF2020 project has demonstrated how IoT can be implemented and used in farming and food production for many different sectors and application areas. This was done by integrating and re-using available IoT technologies based on open architectures and standards. By providing active business support many solutions or components have already found their way to the market ensuring a large-scale uptake and others have made significant progress towards market readiness. A large and coherent European ecosystem has been developed, which will continue to grow and flower through new projects and Digital Innovation Hubs, especially supported by the SmartAgriHubs project. In this way IoF2020 has fostered a large-scale take-up of IoT in the European farming and food domain boosted digital innovation and consequently improved productivity and sustainability.