1/18 Leveraging SMEs’ Strenght

for INSPIRE

Glenn Vancauwenberghe (KU Leuven SADL)

Piergiorgio Cipriano

(EC JRC)

Contributors: Giacomo Martirano (Epsilon Italia)

Elena Roglia (EC JRC) Danny Vandenbroucke (KU Leuven SADL)

INSPIRE Conference

Firenze, June 27th 2013

2/18 key questions

1. What is the size of the Geo-ICT sector in Europe? How many Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs)? And how big is the market?

2. What are the main characteristics of these Geo-ICT companies? And what are their core activities?

3. How is the Geo-ICT sector currently involved in the implementation of INSPIRE?

4. Do Geo-ICT sector companies in Europe have the skills and knowledge to participate in the implementation of INSPIRE?

5. Does INSPIRE already have an impact on the innovative performance of Geo-ICT companies in Europe?

3/18 smeSpire project

Rationale of smeSpire project (May 2012 – April 2014):

SMEs can enable countries to fulfill the INSPIRE Directive, creating new market opportunities with increased potential for innovation and new jobs.

Objective of the project: “to encourage and enable the participation of SMEs in the mechanisms of harmonizing and making geodata available.”

Activities:

1. STUDY : Assess the market potential for SMEs 2. TRAINING: Develop a multilingual training package 3. BEST PRACTICES: Collect and exploit a BP Catalogue 4. TRANSFER: Create a network capable of transferring result-

driven knowledge throughout Europe

4/18 smeSpire study

5/18

source: EC-JRC, 2007, Mapping the ICT in EU Regions http://ipts.jrc.ec.europa.eu/publications/pub.cfm?id=1554

ICT SMEs in Europe

ICT SMEs 480,000 (Eurostat, 2009)

“micro” (< 10empl.) 90%

Total turnover 400bln€

Employees: 2.9 million

smeSpire estimation:

up to 2% of ICT SMEs dealing with GI

6/18 Geo-ICT SMEs in Europe

source: http://www.smespire.eu/map/smes/map.html

Employees “small” (< 50 empl.) 90%

“micro” (<10 empl.) 60%

Turnover

< 1 mil € 75%

< 500.000 € 58%

Group

16 % is part of an enterprise group

7/18 year of foundation

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

% o

f co

mp

anie

s fo

un

de

d -

pe

r ye

ar

a: Oracle (1978), dbf (1979) b: ArcInfo, AutoCAD (1982), MapInfo (1985) c: www (1990), Mosaic browser (1993) d: US Ex.Order 12906, OGC (1994), ArcView 1, Java (1995), shapefile , Mapquest (1996) e: OSM (2004), GoogleMaps, PostGIS (2005), OpenLayers (2006)

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020

Cu

mu

lati

ve %

of

com

pan

ies

Timeline

a b

c

d

e

8/18 activities & customers

0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70%

Education

Implementation of network services

General IT consultancy

Data modeling

Transformation of spatial data

Development of client applications

Use of spatial data

all activities

primary activity

Customers? • Public sector as the main customer for most companies (60%) • Public authorities at local/regional/national level in their own country

9/18 knowledge of INSPIRE

Current awareness of INSPIRE “Well, ... yes, I have heard”

31%

69% No

Yes

10/18 knowledge of INSPIRE

Knowledge in the organization of INSPIRE and INSPIRE regulation

• Knowledge of general objectives and principles is high • Regulations about “Data” and “Network services” are less known

Objectives

Main Principles

Conceptual Framework

Metadata regulation

Data and Service regulation

Network Services regulation

Interoperability of spatial data sets and…

Monitoring and reporting obligations regulation

5.0

1.8

2.1

1.4

1.4

2.5

3.2

6.4

18.1

18.5

21.7

20.3

19.9

18.9

16.7

22.1

45.9

44.5

36.3

35.6

35.2

31.0

35.2

23.8

Very low / low Average High / very high

11/18 INSPIRE involvement

Current involvement in INSPIRE Only 1/3 of participant companies is directly involved in INSPIRE activities: • most of them as a contractor of public authorities • some of them as member of interest communities or expert in thematic

working groups

34%

66% Yes

No

12/18 INSPIRE involvement

Current development of INSPIRE compliant components (%)

• Companies mainly involved in development of view services and data modeling (both 26%) and metadata catalogue (21%)

• Lowest involvement is on schema transformation (9.6%)

26.0

16.4

21.0

16.0

26.0

17.1 15.3

9.6

12.1

16.4

13/18 impact of INSPIRE

Changes already occurred and/or foreseen due to INSPIRE Directive

• impact of INSPIRE already quite high, and expected to increase in future • current impact related to introduction of new products/services • future impact related to new products/services and new customers

Introduction of new or significantly improvedproducts/services

New or significantly improved methods ofproducing products/services

Delivery of products/services to new customergroups/geographic markets

Delivery of products/services in less time orlower cost

42.0

33.5

31.7

28.1

73.7

67.3

71.9

66.2

Foreseen Occurred

14/18 barriers to innovation

Lack of funds within your enterprise or group

Lack of finance from sources outside your enterprise

Innovation costs too high

Lack of qualified personnel

Lack of information on technology

Difficulty in finding cooperation partners for innovation

Market dominated by established enterprises

Uncertain demand for innovative products or services

23.1

19.9

35.9

25.6

20.3

31.0

24.9

31.3

27.8

30.2

23.1

19.6

10.3

21.7

28.8

35.2

13.2

13.9

5.7

2.8

2.5

5.0

18.5

9.6

Average High Very high

Barriers that hinder or prevent innovation

• Main barrier: dominance of market by established enterprises • Several barriers related to financial aspects • Internal and external barriers

15/18

34%

66% Yes

No

R&D and innovation projects

EU co-funded research

Only 1/3 of participant companies was involved in co-funded R&D projects in 2011: • 65% of them in 7th Framework Programme (FP7) • 23% of them with co-funded annual budget lower than 10K€ • 10% of them with co-funded annual budget between 100K€ and 500K€

16/18 R&D and innovation projects

FP7 projects (all topics)

In the period 2007-2012 there were: • 18,000 projects founded • more than 40,000 participant organizations • 31bln€ funded by EU FP7 projects dealing with GI ~200 projects with direct focus on Geographic Information: • search on Cordis web site: “inspire” or “geoss” or “gmes” or “spatial” or “geo” • more than 1,000 participants • 482mln€ • 381 EU27 cities involved

SMEs difficulties Very hard for SMEs to participate in EU-funded projects: • barriers in creating or entering a consortium and make proposals • advance payments are very low • Percentage of SMEs’ funded budget is very low (14% of total*)

* smeSpire elaboration on ICT FP7 projects only (http://open-data.europa.eu/en/data/dataset/ict-research-projects-under-eu-fp7)

17/18 R&D and innovation activities

FP7 projects regarding “Geoinformation”: lines represent connections between partners involved (colour and width measure the amount of EC funding received from by each city-partner from each city-coordinator)

18/18 thank you!

Questions, comments?

Want to participate?

smeSpire study: • JRC: Piergiorgio Cipriano, Max Craglia, Elena Roglia, Paul Smits • KU Leuven: Glenn Vancauwenberghe, Danny Vandenbroucke

smeSpire project: • Coordinator: Giacomo Martirano (Epsilon Italia) • www.smespire.eu • @smespire • smespire