Last Wednesday, Francisco Rodriguez (CTO) and I participated in the H2020 project EDI kick-off meeting organised in Bilbao, Spain. The project, coordinated by the University of Deusto is formed by 5 core partners (Deusto, Zabala Consulting, Engineering, F6S and Etventure Start Up) and 15 data providers in very different fields like energy, automotive, traffic, logistics, marketing, etc.
EDI will enable Big Data focused EXPERIMENTATION and BUSINESS INCUBATION by making available the tools (hardware & software), data and resources (funding and business orientation) for the future Big Data companies in Europe.
The project has a duration of 42 months and budget of 7.7M€, of which 5M€ are dedicated to start-ups defining new services exploiting both the data offered and the Big Data Stack. The selection of the twinning start-ups will follow a funnel approach:
- EXPLORE (2 months / 5.000 €): Detailed work focused on the service proposed and generation of a mock-up.
- EXPERIMENT (4 months / 80.000 €): Generation of the demonstrator of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
- EVOLVE (2 months / 15.000 €): Generation of the business model and contact with investor for service commercialization.
This loop will be repeated three times during the project, and it is expected than 140 start-ups will be supported by this process, with around 20 reaching the final phase.
By means of this high-level technical architecture and the open call management, EDI will eliminate barriers for Big Data Business Incubation:
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- Free infrastructure with open source tools
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- Training on the most known off-the-shelf solutions
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- Previous experience in incubators (DEC & etventure) and accelerators in FIWARE (FINODEX)
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- Connection with the largest online network for start-ups
JOT Internet Media is participating in this project as a Data Provider, generating complete data sets containing all the statistics about Internet and Digital Marketing. In addition, JOT will define the main challenges related to this data and evaluate the business proposed by the start-ups and SMEs.
We hope that this data will be combined and integrated with other data to enrich it and generate added-value data-driven services using analytical tools like clustering, predictive or recommendation algorithms.
From our side, this project will help us to keep on investing resources in R&D activities, increasing our knowledge about the Big Data framework and be in contact with highly innovative ideas and solutions coming from the start-ups themselves.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the grant agreement No 779790
Dr. Fernando Perales, Strategic Funding Manager