The session hold in Poznan, Poland on October 26th 2011, aimed at the identification of common assets and priorities of different Future Internet communities to support the way RDI projects can grow into sustainable businesses, was introduced by representatives of three different Future Internet communities (Dr. Petra Turkama, CONCORD project coordinator, Future Internet PPP, Mr. Jarmo Eskelinen ENoLL Vice-chair representing the Living Labs community and Mr. Cezary Mazurek representing the eHealth community) that from different perspectives raised some common points such as the importance of the learning process, the need of starting doing things differently in the Future Internet community to really trigger entrepreneurship and bringing value to society and different usage areas, the acceptance and managing of failure as a key success point in the innovation process, and the need to work across programmes and communities. Furthermore, Mazurek highlighted the fact that eHealth can only be built if the Future Internet community and the Health community work together and stated that Infrastructure is the driven force from bringing innovation and innovative solutions to the users.
This session brought together important names from all the communities present such as the Project Coordinators of CONCORD (Dr. Petra Turkama), FI-WARE (Mr Jose Jimenez), INFINITY (Dr. Federico Alvarez) and representation of ENVIROFI (Mr. Antonio Olivan) from the FI-PPP community, the ENoLL President (Prof. Alvaro de Oliveira), Vice-president (Mr. Jarmo Eskelinen), Secretary (Prof. Dr. Pieter Ballon) and representation from one fo the ENoLL founder Living Labs from the Living Lab community (Ms. Annika Sallstrom), the Coordinator of the FI Roadmap (Mr. Nick Wainwright) from the Future Internet community in general, and representatives of the UNIVERSAAL (Mr. Joe Gorman) and pMedicine (Mr. Juliusz Pukacki) as well as Technical Coordinator of Wielkopolska Center for Telemedicine project (Dr. Cezary Mazurek).
Ballon, from the Living Lab community, brought up three important points that kicked off the discussion: the need to handle user behaviour transformation, possibilities of crowdsourcing and the need to work in Business model innovation. This last point was fairly well supported by Alvarez, Infinity project, who described the need to link technology and business innovation. Jimenez, FI-WARE project coordinator, emphasized some of the points brought up in the introduction such as the need of doing things differently with more flexibility and openness and always accepting failure. The challenges of involving real users, either professionals as in the eHealth usage area or final users or citizens, where very well described by Mr. Juliusz Pukacki, representative of the eHealth community, and Ms. Annika Sallstrom, representative of the Living Lab community. They talked about the difficulties and barriers of involving users taking into account different factors such as particularities of individuals, fear to technology, regulatory aspects, importance of ethics and respect for the individual needs and demands, highlighting the fact that users can not be controlled. This point was also raised in the introduction, where Eskelinen described the chaotic aspect of societies and human beings, as requirements for the technology and infrastructure to meet.
Mr. Nick Wainwright, Future Internet Roadmap coordinator, brought up three important points and challenges to the FIPPP and Living Labs community: For the technology suppliers, “let us know what your plans are” (point also raised by Mr. Joe Gorman), for the demand side, ”demand more, be more specific and tell us what you need”, and the importance to engage with the challenging developers community who are the ones really innovating with the infrastructure and bringing solutions to the users and they are vehicle for knowledge transfer.
Oliveira described the Smart Cities as the arena to bring together the Future Internet and the Living Labs community and brought up the view of the non-European community already using Living Labs as a tool for Innovation in the ICT sector.
Another important point in the discussion, raised by Gorman, is the need of a platform to support the whole value chain, assisting developers, execution of services, and helping to bridge the gap between sellers and customers. Mr. Antonio Olivan, representative of the FIPPP usage area community, emphasized this need of a platform that provides capabilities to deliver something useful for the end-users.
Conclusions of this session, which had a very participative audience and outstanding moderation, are the need to communicate better and to define concrete activities to build bridges among all the different communities before starting to build results together, and the need to be more concrete and specific to develop further.
Rapporteurs/Organisers: Dr Petra Turkama, AALTO University, Ms. Ana Garcia, European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL AISBL), Dr. Cezary Mazurek, Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center.
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