To succeed in today’s economy, we must understand that technology will disrupt most major industries. As Indiana becomes a landing pad for entrepreneurs and innovations, our true recipe for success is in how we integrate technology into our current economic hub of agriculture, life sciences and manufacturing.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is changing and shifting our ideas of how hardware can interact with the internet. Maybe it’s a soda machine that stocks extra Mountain Dew when school lets out, or a sprinkler system that knows when rain is imminent and therefore doesn’t drown the grass with water. It could even be a life saving device that provides you with insulin when you need it, instead of waiting for you to give it to yourself.

Who is going to come up with those ideas and how will they be implemented? One solution is in the newly announced Indiana IoT Lab Network.

Designed to bring together a critical mass of innovators, entrepreneurs and those impacted by IoT technologies, the Indiana IoT Lab Network creates a front door to Indiana’s IoT customers and resources that will help bring the best of the best together so our state’s top industries will be positioned for success.

John Wechsler, Founder and CEO of Launch Fishers, is leading the initiative that includes founding members: ClearObject (formerly CloudOne) and Indiana University. The first Indiana IoT Lab Network will occupy 24,000 square feet located near Launch Fishers in the Nickel Plate District and called IoT Lab-Fishers.

Annual membership levels offer access into the IoT Lab-Fishers space along with IoT-focused programming and resources — think ‘co-working for IoT.’ The facility will be dedicated to bringing together the four key components to IoT solutions: ideation, cloud data, edge hardware, and development. You can read more about these four components in this post.

McDonald plans to grow his company’s employee base by 15% in 2017 with a second ClearObject facility located within IoT Labs. Entrepreneurs and companies that join IoT Lab-Fishers will be in close proximity to this highly-skilled tech talent. In traditional co-working fashion, these relationships are ones that will spur the next innovations and successes in IoT and beyond. “We want to be able to accommodate anything that you can dream up,” said McDonald.

Indiana IoT Lab Network partners include Indiana University, Launch Fishers, KSM Consulting, the Indiana Economic Development Corporation, Stratosphere Quality, the City of Fishers, ClearObject, Launch Indiana, DeveloperTown, and Ball State University.