In the last decades, an increasing need to introduce smart environments to apply an efficient Digital and Sustainable Transition in heterogeneous application scenarios, emerged in our society. With the aim of dealing with such a necessity, the mission of the I-STORE center is focused on smart environments and innovative solutions based on emerging IoT technologies.

Nowadays, the work of the different stakeholders of the domain often remains confined in their own sector without any joint collaboration and sharing with the other actors that would be interested in the obtained results. In fact, within the research point of view, many research stakeholders usually produce many research products that, although they are often transformed into excellent scientific publications, they remain strictly confined to the academic community. Furthermore, on the other hand, many companies and public institutes that could actually benefit from innovations, usually do not invest enough resources in digital transformation because they do not actually perceive benefits and opportunities.

The I-STORE center was funded to overcome these limits and face current challenges expressed by the different stakeholders. I-STORE is an interdepartmental Research Center composed of four different departments of the University of Salento: Engineering for Innovation, Mathematics & Physics, Economic Sciences and Legal Sciences.

It is mainly focused on emerging ICT technologies enabling the Internet of Things and it aims at defining and experimenting with innovative smart environments able to guarantee safety, security and sustainability. This goal is reached by planning strategic directions and a good synergy among the various research units that compose the center. Moreover, research activities and strategic directions are defined in accordance to the main stakeholders' needs involved with the aim of encouraging an effective knowledge transfer from experimental research units to applied research units by promoting the design and the development of solutions with a Technology Readiness Level (TRL) less than 6. Finally, the I-STORE center aims to stimulate and to support other organizations to apply an effective technology transfer in the socio-economic context through several functional demonstrators.