The Internet of Things (IoT) will exponentially increase the scale and the complexity of existing computing and communication systems. In a world of multi-stakeholder information and assets provision on top of millions of real-time interacting and communicating Things, autonomicity is an imperative property and a grand challenge. Autonomic Things will allow systems to self-manage the complexity, the dynamicity and the distribution of the IoT. In order to make Things able to manage themselves and contribute to the global self-management network, we have to empower them with mandatory properties like situational-awareness, knowledge, smartness and social behavior. In this paper we present the approach that the COSMOS project introduces in order to enable Things to evolve and act in a more autonomous way, becoming more reliable and smarter.