News

FI-IMPACT Findings

30 June 2016

FI-IMPACT has now completed analyis of the FI-PPP Phase 3 FIWARE Acceleration Programme, which was undertaken over a two year period of time. The main findings are published in Deliverable 2.4 Update of Impact Assessment and Forecast

Since its launch in September 2014, over 8,000 start-ups and SMEs submitted proposals under Calls launched by the 16 FIWARE Accelerators, of which 985 were awarded FIWARE Grants as at May 2016. FIWARE sub-grantees undertook the FI-IMPACT Impact Assessment Survey during their acceleration phase to provide empirical data to assess the impact of the Programme. Based on analysis of the portfolios of sub-grantees funded, it is clear that while there is generally good representation across Europe, it was particularly attractive for enterpreneurs where there is limited access to seed capital for new business ideas. Forty seven percent of the subgrantees are start-ups with less than one year professional experience running a company. There is also a strong correlation between representation of sub-grantees from countries in which the FIWARE Accelerators were based. 

Sub-grantees are addressing a wide variety of vertical markets leveraging FIWARE Enablers for production environments with 60% focused on B2B solutions and 20% B2C. 

FI-IMPACT undertook KPI Assessment across 648 subgrantees who completed the Impact Assessment Survey. Subgrantees performed moderately well on Innovation Focus, Market Focus and Market Needs, demonstrating that they had a good grasp on aspects related to development of their business idea and vision of the market. 

The objectives of the FI-PPP Phase 3 have been well realised with support provided to SMEs, entrepreneurs and start ups to launch innovative products and solutions and the FIWARE ecosystem extended beyond traditional players in the Framework Programme.

Based on the analysis undertaken, FI-IMPACT expects that by 2020 Phase 3 of the FI-PPP will have contributed to the creation of 300 healthy enterprises, surviving from the initial 985 funded initiatives. These companies will leverage the FIWARE open-source technology platform to gain approximately €394 million of revenues in the year 2020 (increased from the €279 million of the 1st release of our model), correspond to €1.2 billion cumulative revenues in the 2014-2020 timeframe. The greatest share of the revenues (€203 million in 2020) will be generated by the providers of hardware and software solutions that will likely exploit the IoT wave of innovation. As such, this is already a very positive direct impact of the €80 million invested by Phase 3 in the acceleration programme.