A two-day event called “Innovative partnerships and Future Internet development in the enlarged EU” organized on September 17th, 18th in Poznan, Poland, was the scenario for a successful FI-PPP call 3 info-day that attracted an international audience of over 100 participants interested in the innovation and business development aspects of the Future Internet. The event, organised by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education, and the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center and supported by the European Commission, the Future Internet Public-Private Partnership (FI-PPP) and Ideal-IST Project, had an strong networking and brokering component and attracted local SMEs, Future Internet Research Institutions, and potential FI-PPP phase 3 proposers from different locations in Europe.
Cezary Mazurek, PSNC, and Piotr Kępski, MSHE
Cezary Mazurek, PSNC, and Piotr Kępski, MSHE, welcoming the first day that had as main objective to bring together FI-PPP, European national and regional Future Internet initiatives, projects and business stakeholders to support them in building innovative and inclusive Future Internet ecosystems. Arian Zwegers, European Commission, provided an overview of the Future Internet in FP7 and in H2020. Mr. Zwegers took the audience to a short historical trip describing the main triggers to originally include Future Internet in the FP7 and providing afterwards an introduction to the H2020 programme and highlighting the new aspects such as the focus on Societal challenges, innovation, the importance of the experimentation and validation in real-life settings, and the need to reach different actors and stakeholders. FI-PPP was seen in this context as a front-runner towards the H2020. Nuria de Lama (ATOS Research) provided specific information about the Future Internet Core Platform (FIWARE), the Generic Enablers, the Generic Enablers Implementations and the FIWARE Open Innovation Lab (FI-LAB). She also gave an overview of the phase1 and phase2 projects and emphasized the novelty of the FI-PPP in bringing together the technology developers and the technology users, and the strong focus on innovation and exploitation.
Jarmo Eskelinen (FVH, Finland / ENoLL)
Cezary Mazurek, opened the second session of the day by providing an appealing overview of the infrastructure for Future Internet development in Poland. His presentation was followed by 3 other national and international initiatives in Hungary (Future Internet Technology Platform, presented by Peter Bakonyi), Sweden (Cluster 55 initiative presented by Micael Gustafsson) and Finland (Living Labs, presented by Jarmo Eskelinen). Mr. Eskelinen linked the regional and national innovation initiatives to the European and international scale through living labs and tackled the aspect of how the Future Internet can support SMEs to scale their products, the role of cities as enablers, the city to city interoperability and the innovation powers of communities.
Local Web-entrepreneur
A panel called “Building the ecosystem: Identification of own strengths” and moderated by Cezary Mazurek opened the afternoon sessions. Some key messages from the panel were: the multidimensional aspect of the Future Internet ecosystem (funding, technology, people, strong players driving the ecosystem); the need to build communities and to involve users and local actors; the importance of a good networking at national and international level; the role of the cities and the importance of their strategies in supporting these ecosystems; the importance of the human capital and the attitude toward entrepreneurship and the innovative mindset; the importance of the regional dimension and the support from structural funds; and the need to not only look for new product and services but for being more efficient and capability to scale.
The day ended with a series of pitches by local SMEs that presented their innovative Future Internet services and products, and that stimulated the networking and helped the audience to understand the great potential of innovation of the Polish local ecosystem.
“European brokerage event for umbrella organisations and clusters in the context of FI-PPP” was the name given to the second day fully dedicated to the Future Internet PPP. The European Commission representative provided detailed information for potential call 3 proposers, covering the programme architecture, the steps taken from the platform components, to platforms and to 3rd party applications and users. He emphasized the focus on SME intermediaries in this 3rd call and the possibility of building proposals based on domain specific ecosystems, company ecosystems or territorial based ecosystems. FI-WARE (Nuria de Lama), INFINITY (Cezary Muzarek), FI-CONTENT (Barbara Zambrini) , FIspace (Sjaak Wolfert), FINESCE (Rafael Artych), FIStar (Joanna Modlawska) and XIFI were present in this second day, and provided the audience with relevant information for call 3 proposers.
Barbara Zambrini (FI-CONTENT)
FIWARE extended the presentation given during the 1st day of this event by explaining the basic principles of the FIWARE Generic Enablers, the FI-WARE data chapters, the FIWARE Wiki and the FIWARE catalog. Ceszary Mazurek presented the Infinity project that has identified and contacted over 400 FI infrastructures across Europe and analysed and evaluated 160 of them and developed the XIPI repository. Barbara Zambrini, BBC, presented the FI-CONTENT proposition based on 3 platforms (Social connected TV, Smart City platform and Pervasive gaming), and provided very clear description of Specific Enablers and terms and conditions for usage. Barbara also emphasized the strong focus of the project on user communities and real-life experimentation.
Sjaak Wolfert (FIspace)
Sjaak Wolfart presented the FIspace Business to Business collaboration platform, provided information about the platform architecture and the roadmap and gave some useful information about how FIspace will support the upcoming phase 3 projects. He also provided some useful example of cross use case collaboration for phase 3. The eHealth FI-PPP phase 2 platforms, FIstar, was presented by Joanna Modlawska who provided clear explanations about the platform architecture and some examples of applications areas. Rafael Artych provided relevant information about FINESCE, the phase 2 project and platform focused on Smart Energy, such us the FINESCE trial sites all over Europe, the architecture and innovative API layer, the SME contests and project open calls supported by the so called Innovation events. XIFI project closed the round of phase 2 FI-PPP presentations. Martin Potts, Martel Consulting, explained the initial set up of the FI-PPP core project in 5 sites (combining physical nodes with associated partners that offer connectivity), the open call that will bring new infrastructures and the important task of XIFI in being the experimentation and validation environment for Generic and Specific Enablers.
The afternoon session of this second day hosted some presentations from potential proposers including some project ideas and interested partners. Moreover, the Ideal-IST project provided details about the networking and brokering capabilities that the project developed platform offers to proposers through the NCPs.
Adam Olszewski (PSNC)
The FI-PPP thanks the organisers and hosts for this successful event that has highly contributed to build consortiums for the upcoming phase 3. Poznan has also shown by organizing this event and the contribution of so many local stakeholders, its capacity for innovation and contribution to the Future Internet development.
More information and presentations can be found at www.fi-ppp.pl.
