Main theme: Collaboration in a Hyperconnected World

A part of our everyday life is increasingly formed by hyperconnectivity. Digital interconnection of people and things is expanding to anytime and anywhere in the world. It is estimated that by 2020 over 50 billion networked devices will co-exist in the world. There are profound and challenging social, political, and economic consequences associated with such a vast level of connectivity. In a hyperconnected world, humans, intelligent agents, machines and devices generate data, interconnect through data, and act together, evolving toward an increasingly effective collective intelligence within an exponentially growing platform.

In the last two decades, advances in ICT, Internet, and cloud have led to the explosion of collaborative networks, both at the level of people through social networks and virtual communities, and at the level of organizations through business ecosystems, dynamic supply chains, virtual organizations, and their breeding environments. This trend is amplified by the emergence of the Internet of Things and Cyber-Physical Systems, addressing a pervasive interconnection of and collaboration among physical and virtual objects.

New collaboration structures, technologies and governance models need to be envisioned and developed to deal with large amounts of diverse inter-connected objects and enable to reach new levels of collective awareness and intelligence, facilitating new forms of co-creation, more effective problem solving, and collective decision making.

PRO-VE 2016 will provide a forum for sharing experiences, discussing trends, identifying challenges, and introducing innovative solutions aimed at fulfilling the vision of a hyperconnected world.