Goals
Market uptake is the global and final objective of digital-water.city. Communities of Practice (CoPs) aim to increase opportunities for market uptake and for exploitation of the project outcomes. They will do so by providing dedicated business development support to innovators, and by creating new spin-offs.
Therefore, the goal is to generate the necessary conditions for co-creation and open innovation by establishing a three-tiered scheme of CoPs, with the aim of integrating stakeholder knowledge into product development and testing. They will ensure:
- the transferability of the digital solutions to other European or international contexts
- that knowledge transfer is supported beyond DWC
- the creation of durable links between European cities
Approach
DWC will bring together project partners and external stakeholders to facilitate co-learning and co-development in the framework of a three-tiered scheme of CoPs at local level (city scale), at intra-project level and at trans-project level.
Together with the CoPs, DWC proposes an ambitious exploitation strategy based on:
- assessment of the market for digital water solutions to identify the dynamics of the suitable market segments for specific DWC digital solutions
- support for the development of new business models for established companies, and capacity building for SME partners to perform in-house market assessment and business development based on a collaborative online tool
- use of the collaborative tool to assess market potential for the digital solutions developed by SMEs and to identify competitors and existing competitive products/services
- feasibility and replicability studies across the European market for DWC digital solutions
- the creation of two new spinoffs based on new open source software and analytics services