When it comes to recruiting companies to Internet-of-Things initiatives, the Z-Wave Alliance seems to have taken a leaf out of the Thread Group’s book by dangling the free-membership carrot in front of up-and-coming smart-home innovators.

The yearlong Z-Wave Labs Program is an upcoming contest that will let startups and entrepreneurs compete for free Alliance memberships and more—much in the same way as the Innovation Enabler Program that the Nest-led Thread Group announced recently.

For the uninitiated, the Z-Wave Alliance is a consortium of companies invested in Z-Wave, a low-power, wireless mesh-networking technology owned by Sigma Designs, that’s popular in the connected-home market. The group says the Z-Wave ecosystem of wireless control products and services is the world’s largest, with more than 1200 commercially available products from 300-plus companies currently on the market.

With that out of the way, let’s get back to the IoT competition.

In addition to a free 12-month membership to the Z-Wave Alliance, each of the competition’s twelve monthly winners will also receive a Sigma Designs 500-series Z-Wave Developer Kit. The kit is essentially a suite of hardware and software tools necessary for developing Z-Wave enabled products.