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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - EUGENIUS (European Group of Enterprises for a Network of Information Using Space)

Teaser

Summary

The Eugenius project wished to build both organizational and technical solutions to bring EO services companies closer local end users. In fact, in Europe many EO companies are small and over-specialized, with weak commercial reach. It is important that local, small end-users can benefit from the services produced by those experts.
The project aimed at demonstrating the feasibility and the efficiency of an innovative business concept, whereby some industrial companies specialized in EO services production, agreed in putting their applicative tools at the disposal of all partners in order to boost the commercial penetration of these applicative tools in all regions where a partner is located. This intended to allow local end users to easily access to the full portfolio of products, as generated by all available applicative tools.
The overall objective of the EUGENIUS project was to develop a European commercial service network consisting of a set of regional generic and sustainable hubs in proximity to the EO potential needs and market of each region for Land & Natural Resources Managementâ€. During the 24-months timeframe of the project, the following specific objectives were targeted:
OBJECTIVE 1: To develop a viable market based on EO services for different thematic domains linked to territories management (Urbanization, Agriculture, Forestry, etc.) in various European regions
OBJECTIVE 2: To build up a network of replicable and generic processing and archiving platforms to ensure regular access to the Copernicus data and core services results, and to support collaborative actions among them. These platforms are implemented in 5 European pilot Regions called the EUGENIUS hubs
OBJECTIVE 3: To push for making applicative tools able to generate â€œindustrializedâ€ end products.
OBJECTIVE 4: To demonstrate the economical sustainability of the EUGENIUS concept by making each regional Hub self-sustained thanks to its regional market. Each SME partner shall thus be able togenerate a minimum turnover of about 1 Mâ‚¬ in its regional market.
OBJECTIVE 5: To ensure active involvement of users in all phases of the project through interactive processes, and appropriate communication actions for disseminating the results with end users with the support of the Nereus network.

Work performed

The consortium worked on 4 main topics:
1. The sustainability of the association and interest for its members
The main results are (1) a market assessment which shows the economic sustainability of the network in all regional hubs, (2) the definition of a business model based on subcontracts, royalties and fees, and supported by ready-to-use documents for pre-commercial and commercial agreements, (3) the identification of a business plan including network enlargement

2. Users involvement and communication
A large diversity of communication tools was deployed and managed: website, web forum, twitter accounts, as well as material for event communication (logos, leaflets, posters). In addition, we developed a marketing-oriented web platform called showroom available in all regional hubs..
The consortium participated in peer reviewed publications, international conferences and workshops.
Numerous meetings with end users were also organized in the regions for different purposes: presentation of EUGENIUS, functional requirements, presentation of results.

3. Development of data exchange platforms in regional hubs
At the beginning of the project, the EUGENIUS technical platforms were prefigured to become the nodes of the network by supporting data exchange and tool processing. However, thanks to a design phase implemented before the development, the consortium re-oriented the platforms towards the facilitation of collaboration between partners.
They were developed for facilitating data and information sharing, workflow management, and showroom.

4. The industrialization of the applicative tools
The partners focused on the packaging of their tools, often originating from research (algorithms, demonstrators) into robust, reliable, error-free application tools. We focused on reproducibility. This major challenge was partly addressed in the EUGENIUS project by the set-up of â€œIndustrialization Guidelinesâ€. These guidelines provide the tool owners with a framework of principles, rules, best practices and recommendations for delivering on the market high quality services and products.

5. The implementation of pilot cases
A total of 27 pilot cases were run in all regional hubs with the aim of testing the interest of end users for applicative tools from the network. All consortium partners invested a lot of effort in those tests to seize the opportunity of the project to define the positive aspects constraints of implementing a partnerâ€™s tool in a new context.

Final results

Globally, the project was successful in building and consolidating the network of companies into a fully operational association. The founding members have experienced positively the exchange of applicative tools to better serve end users in their regional hubs.
By the end of the project, 5 applicative tools (for Agriculture, Forestry and Urbanization) have been used in at least 5 different regional environments. A total of 26 end usersâ€™ organizations have been directly involved in the phase 2 and phase 3 pilot tests.
The use of COPERNIUCS products (mainly SENTINEL data) allowed to reduce more than 20% the price of three products of the network: Pixagri products, Flood monitoring, and Landslides monitoring.
The regional GIS were connected to the regional Eugenius Hubs in Occitania (Open IG), Alsace (SIGAL), Apulia and Wallonia Regions to receive products generated by the applicative tools.
A market analysis showed that the regional markets for most of the tools can be large enough to justify commercial actions by each regional partner in order to tackle this new business (the potential market is for almost all regions bigger than 1 Mâ‚¬ per year and per region). This analysis also showed that the key for development is to be able to undertake marketing actions in all regions, showing the added value brought by each applicative tool. The local presence of the Eugenius partners will help, but some efforts are still to be done for proving that this market capacity can actually be transformed into a concrete business. For this purpose, a total of 5 commercial people have been recruited or r-directed in the past 6 months by the Eugenius partners to boost this commercial penetration of all Eugenius products in all related regions.
An effective result of the project is that 5 services contracts were awarded and 10 others are under negotiations by actual customers to some regional partners after the pilot tests performance. These contracts would not have been achievable without the Eugenius project. In addition, actions have been undertaken towards Chile (by TerraNIS) and African countries (by Spacebel) to promote the products generated by Eugenius partners.
The association now includes at the end of the project 11 partners located in 10 regions from 8 different countries (France, Belgium, Italy, Greece, Germany, Czech Rep., Bulgaria and Austria). Discussions are ongoing with 5 more partners. Furthermore, one Eugenius hub has been installed in Santiago de Chile, with possibilities of demonstrations of Eugenius partnerâ€™s services.