While each partner in the project has its own exploitation ambition (detailed in Section 2), the main innovation potential of the project builds upon the collective integration of expertise and technologies of the IT and water sector which will accelerate water industry digitalization while increasing its potential.
Fiware4Water pushes innovation towards three main directions:
(i) Technical innovation: The water market is established for years. Water operators have deployed over the time complex systems to collect water network information being stored within central database and exploited mostly within SCADA for control as well as visualising data from their different and often unconnected services. Making cross analysis over data from these different services is often made manually, leading to delays and reduced efficiency. Providing utilities with a way to connect their internal legacy and heterogeneous services together through developer friendly interfaces will allow them to increase their data exploitation potential, enable data sharing and increase efficiency.
(ii) Business and Exploitation innovation : Fiware4Water is not only building upon the FIWARE technical results but it also intends to benefit and extent the FIWARE innovation ecosystem made by more than 800 SMEs which embraced the FIWARE paradigm thanks to a network of business accelerators (This approach allows SMEs to provide new services, rapidly deployable, to the existing market. Consequently, the technology offer of Fiware4Water is future proof as it not only includes state of the art distributed cloud technologies such as micro-service based architectures, semantic interoperability of data, but also considers the forthcoming innovations on the device side such as advanced multi-purpose reconfigurable water quality sensors or drone based inspection of water infrastructure.
(iii) Social innovation : Finally, a dedicated Work Package is targeted at facilitating, or accelerating, the impacts of the project, not only through dissemination and communication, but also with the mapping of the different stakeholders, an active involvement of the targeted end-users, the description of an enabling environment for the innovation, the capacity building of the different parties (solution designers, implementers, decision-makers, etc), and the elaboration of the “story of innovation”, i.e. the description of the path from project outputs to impacts. The Council for Citizen Engagement in Sustainable Urban Strategies (ConCensus), which will be initially demonstrated in Demo Case #5, involves the creation of a framework which not only incorporates citizen voices in local administrative and utility decision-making but increases the responsiveness of government and utilities by endowing citizens with oversight authority and the capacity to hold officials and technicians accountable.
Latest Update :
05.27.2020 - Why FIWARE for the Water Sector helps Innovation? From Easy Global Market (EGM)
