ACCORDION D7.1 - Dissemination & exploitation plan

ACCORDION project aims at unlocking the full potential of a big class of applications that are too latency- sensitive, or data-dependent, to be moved to the public cloud. In particular, ACCORDION couples efficient, decentralized and AI-based solutions for cloud and edge resource federation with novel approaches for application definition management and generation at runtime. This deliverable provides the ACCORDION Dissemination and Exploitation plan. Exploitation activities seek to generate new revenue streams for consortium members by introducing new products and services to the market, increasing the market share of existing offerings, securing intellectual property rights through standardization, as well as reducing costs by adopting new processes. These gains can be enjoyed by a single beneficiary or shared among several ACCORDION partners. But in order for these benefits to materialize, selected pieces of information need to be disseminated to external parties that can influence the quality of ACCORDION outputs (such as the research community) or communicated with end users, the media and third parties (e.g., policy makers) in an easy-to-digest way. The ACCORDION dissemination, communication and exploitation plan has been broken down into three consecutive phases: a) the Development phase during the first 2 years of the project where all envisioned ACCORDION products will be specified, developed, integrated, validated and finetuned where necessary. Communication and dissemination will gradually evolve from explaining our vision and approach followed to results obtained and progress beyond the state-of-the-art. Exploitation activities will start with an initial market analysis for each ACCORDION asset/product for revealing end-users' pain points and technology gaps and evolve towards the preliminary formation of individual and joint exploitation plans by consortium members. b) the pre-commercialisation/"result wrap-up" phase during the last year of the project where maturity of ACCORDION outputs will increase and dissemination and communication strategy will continue to be results-oriented in order to stimulate further the market for ACCORDION platform. Regarding exploitation activities, consortium members will perform a techno-economic analysis for assessing the sustainability of individual and joint commercialization plans and discuss details about the business plan(s) to be followed. c) The commercialisation/"follow-up" phase that will commence at the end of the project and targets the launch of products and services based on ACCORDION results; most likely a subset of these as not all ACCORDION outputs are expected to be ready for prime time. This will allow European telecommunication operators, cloud and edge infrastructure providers, as well as service providers of any vertical industry and size, to capitalize on their local resource and other advanced technologies, such as 5G, for enhancing the quality of experience, cost effectiveness and security offered to end-users. To this end, the marketing and business development departments of consortium members, either individually or as part of a joint venture, will continue interacting with targeted audience and explore the path for future upgrades to those product offerings. For each of those phases we outline a set of clear activities and tools through which we will be able to interact with targeted stakeholder groups in an effective way. Acknowledging that ACCORDION members' business development departments, infrastructure providers, service providers in several vertical markets, end-users, policy makers, standardization bodies and research communities (including other research projects) have different backgrounds and objectives, separate (yet linked) strategies and roadmaps have been defined for dissemination, communication and exploitation purposes. Furthermore, a set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) has been defined for benchmarking these activities, as well as an approach utilizing internal tools for monitoring progress and taking corrective measures when necessary.