ITEA is the Eureka Cluster on software innovation
ITEA is the Eureka Cluster on software innovation

ITEA Impact story

ACCELERATE Smart communities

A go-to-market acceleration platform for ICT

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Impact highlights

  • The ACCELERATE platform created by all the partners is now the meeting point for 15 investors and 105 users registered as start-ups. The platform is currently hosting over 60 project ideas.
  • During 2015-2018, Bittium grew significantly and evolved to a clearly more product and innovation-driven company than previously, which is also shown in the revenue share; the product-based net sales rose from 37% in 2H.2017 to 56% in 1H.2019 and the net sales increased by about 16% between 1H.2018 and 1H.2019.
  • Based on the ACCELERATE results, the level of automation for the Finnish industry partner, AAC Global, has increased significantly from where they started; in a typical process, the estimated increase of automated steps is 15%. The turnaround times and go-to-market of the new services and updates to existing services are 20% shorter than before participation in the project. AAC Global most likely would not have reached this level of automation and systematic approach without ACCELERATE.
  • The start-up BEIA Telemetry has witnessed huge growth; from the end of the project until now the hiring rate has gone up by 10% and, in terms of partnerships, three more manufacturers have been contracted with BEIA now offering more precise solutions for indoor and outdoor measurements, like air and water quality, weather forecasts, using on-site sensors and satellite scans.
  • The e-books created by SIRRIS have been used in coaching programmes and so far about 80 companies have been coached.
  • For Mondragon University, company's requests for projects have increased yearly. Often those projects are adopted by the company as solutions to their needs and about 15-20% of the students end up working there.


Innovation is about much more than creating technology; it must 'go to market'. Many companies need new ways to rapidly validate the match between the market and their innovative ICT-intensive technology. The ITEA project ACCELERATE took up the challenge of enabling European technology companies to adopt acceleration know-how by focusing on two goals: the transfer of knowledge on a massive scale and the introduction of a new type of product development, the so-called validated learning process that systematically searches for the technology-market match by validating the mechanics of a business model. This way ACCELERATE set out to shorten the innovation cycle and time-to-market, and to increase the number of new products or solutions as well as the number of ideas that are accelerated and/or created.

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).

Date updated: 19-12-2019

More information

Download ACCELERATE Impact story

Related projects

ACCELERATE

Organisations

AAC Global (Finland)
BEIA Consult International (Romania)
Bittium Wireless Ltd. (Finland)
SIRRIS (Belgium)
University of Mondragón (Spain)