Driving adoption of digital tools across Europe

Small- and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) and public administrations need to embrace artificial intelligence (AI) and other cutting-edge digital tools to be competitive and/or cost-effective. But they often lack the knowhow and the resources. To address this challenge, the European Union’s Digital Europe programme is funding over 600 deployment-based projects to increase AI adoption, strengthen cybersecurity and enhance digital skills. But embracing digital innovation per se might not be enough, if the benefits do not reach the users they are designed for. 

An effective dissemination and exploitation strategy is essential for these projects to promote and deploy their solutions and ensure smooth uptake across Europe. The European Commission-funded DEDEP.eu framework is championing best practices in this area and piloting support services to help others. From apple farmers to beekeepers to makers of plumbing products, the framework is demonstrating how SMEs and local governments can make strategic use of data and AI can help them work smarter and grow their businesses. 

“By facilitating the uptake of these transformative technologies, we’ve seen some amazing projects really making an impact on a national, regional and EU-wide scale,” says DEDEP.eu Coordinator Nicholas Ferguson. “By learning from what can work, we help projects improve their dissemination and exploitation strategies.” Projects can now already apply for support for later this year, he adds.

Disseminating AI across value chains

What can we learn from the DEDEP.eu’s work to-date?  For one, there is strong demand across diverse sectors and end-users. Take the example of Italian apple farmers. Thanks to the agrifood TEF project, they no longer have to wait until their apples are harvested to discover the performance of their orchards. The project’s local partner FBK operates experimental farms and labs that enable companies to test new solutions. In this case, it helped Geoinference, an Italian SME, demonstrate that its AI-enabled software can predict the production and the average calibre of apples, by individual parcel of an orchard. This, in turn, helped convince Revo, an Italian manufacturer of fruit harvesters, to buy the software and add it to its package of products and services for apple farmers so they can make better decisions on how to manage their orchards. That’s a win for potentially hundreds of SMEs, including Geoinference, Revo and individual farmers who adopt the system. 

“Work like that really turns research into reality,” says Raffaele Giaffreda, chief innovation scientist and coordinator of the FBK’s digital testing and experimentation facilities for the agri-food sector. An engineer with experience in telecommunications, he has also been testing other agricultural applications of AI, including climate-smart irrigation and pest control for vintners to smart beehives that use bees as monitors of environmental conditions within their foraging range. 

He notes the EU funding and a strong dissemination strategy are essential to make AI and other new technologies accessible to SMEs, including smallholder farmers. While very large farms have been making increasing use of precision agriculture in recent years, small farmers lack the resources to test new digital tools themselves and have been dependent upon service providers’ marketing claims. Thanks to an effective outreach strategy which included a solutions marketplace and local events, agrifood TEF was able to bridge this gap.

Upskilling traditional businesses

Other DEDEP-funded projects focus on advanced digital skills, supercomputing, cybersecurity and semiconductors. 

Johan Kostela runs Shiftlabs, a technology centre at Mälardalen University in Sweden that has expanded upon existing regional networks of SMEs and academics to test new digital tools. It’s 50% funded by the Digital Europe programme, 50% by local Swedish sources, and has 110 employees. “It’s not a project,” he says, “it’s a building. We’re building infrastructure here.”

Kostela describes a number of success stories involving Swedish SMEs and new digital technologies. In one case, a local company that manufactured metal parts for heavy trucks asked for help making its production system more flexible. Shiftlabs created a 3D model of the factory so that it could quickly re-arrange production on the shop floor in response to rapidly changing needs. “We up-skilled their engineers and now they can do it on their own,” he says. “They are definitely making more money.” 

Another local SME that manufactures plumbing products, Furhoffs Rostfria, wanted help understanding the benefits of new digital tools for its very traditional business. “They knew they needed to change but didn’t know how,” adds Kostela. Shiftlabs helped the company embrace data for better management and digital marketing tools to help reach new customers. 

Now more than two years into a three-year programme, Shiftlabs has supported more than 500 digital transformation projects with 283 individual SMEs, demonstrating the importance of building trusted relationships and leveraging local networks within the Shiftlabs consortium. 

Putting public data to work

Another project funded by the DEDEP framework helps public authorities improve the quality of their public data sets and make them available to others. The EU has minimum quality standards for data sets that specify, for example, how the data should be organised and how to handle missing data. The BeOpen project identifies data sets with no privacy entanglements, such as geographical, meteorological and road safety data, and helps people test them for services to citizens. It’s coordinated by Engineering, an Italian IT company, and has pilot projects in six countries.

“The idea is to have high-value datasets that public administrations can provide to entrepreneurs so they can build smart services or even AI applications,” says Lydia Montandon, community outreach coordinator for the FIWARE Foundation. 

Vilnius, for example, is using public data to try and combat invasive plant species. Germany is using AI-enabled cameras in public spaces to analyse crowd flows and thereby gain insights that can improve security at events. In Spain and Portugal, groups are experimenting with automated illumination at pedestrian crossings to determine if they prevent injuries and save lives. Greece is using meteorological data to try to better predict fires and floods. 

So far, most of the FI Ware project partners are public entities, but Montandon says there is no reason why private companies can’t make use of the same sorts of data—in principle even for free, since the data is public data. “There’s an option within the project to offer this data to businesses to develop services on top of it,” she notes. “We can help them be more efficient and to do more with the resources that they have.”

DEDEP.eu is offering free support to a limited number of DIGITAL-funded projects. This includes reviewing draft and existing dissemination and exploitation plans and providing guidance and recommendations on how to improve them. If you’re involved in a DIGITAL-funded project and interested in getting free advice on your dissemination and exploitation strategy then find out more at DEDEP.eu.