ACCELERATE

Project results

The method created in ACCELERATE was presented by the Belgian partner SIRRIS. It generated one book, “From Idea to Product/Market Fit”, on the basis of different e-books. This book provides guidance, insights, perspective and inspiration to go from idea to product/market fit in three stages: Idea, Problem/Solution and Product/Market Fit. The ACCELERATE partners from Belgium, Finland, France, Romania and Spain created a platform that eases and facilitates interactions between start-ups and investors for business and product ideas or just an idea that can become marketable. The platform was built on Drupal 7 CMS, an enterprise-level open source solution for anything that implies content, user profiles, user roles and access permissions. Start-ups can communicate on the platform, access all the information sections and contribute to the library of resources by adding/publishing tools, methodologies, KPIs, success stories and lessons learnt. Most importantly, they have the possibility to add/edit/remove ideas. Investors can also use these features; for private ideas they must request access from the idea owner in order to view its details.

Exploitation

ACCELERATE immediately had an impact on the project's partners, during and after the project. E.g. in Finland, Elektrobit (since 2015 Bittium) deployed an innovation management information system tool for collecting all ideas and covering the innovation process from idea harvesting to the business validation. Several new business innovations led to either improvement of the products or to completely new innovations, however, the biggest change made was to evolve the company's innovation culture.

Based on the ACCELERATE results, the level of automation for the Finnish industry partner, AAC Global, has increased significantly. AAC Global can also integrate seamlessly the customers' processes and hence increase automation and smart processes even more. In the project, they created completely new service channels and services for their customers, monitoring closely the customer feedback and ROI. This year, the customer portal and backend processes that were a part of the ACCELERATE project will be shared with the global group of companies, Acolad Group, of which AAC Global is part now. The efficiency increase gained from ACCELERATE is thus planned to be scaled up to other entities in the group.

BEIA's telemetry start-up in Romania has been improved through the project by increasing the awareness of telemetry systems among potential clients, as well as increasing the visibility of the solutions in both online and offline environments. The start-up has expanded its telemonitoring solutions from agriculture fields to heliports, photovoltaic parks and smart buildings. In addition, BEIA has become a reseller in Romania for F-Secure, one of the partners from ACCELERATE.

For Mondragon University in Spain, the methodologies and tools identified and designed in ACCELERATE to address the original objectives/challenges have been continuously implemented since the project's end. Every year, 2-3 contests are organised at the university involving different groups of students, companies and territorial agencies. These projects are initiated based on active methodologies (Problem-oriented Project Based Learning (PoPBL).