The following post has been written by the team of FI-Adopt. We would like to thank them for their collaboration and their willingness to participate.
The FI-ADOPT 1st Open Call was closed on 30 October 2014. In total 242 proposals were in progress, but 112 were submitted on time (46,28%). The geographical distribution of the submitted proposals are shown in Figure 1. Spain submitted the maximum number of proposals (31), followed by UK (10), Italy (11), Greece (8), Netherlands (6).
Figure 1: FI-ADOPT 1st Open Call Proposals Geographical Distribution
From the submitted proposals (Figure 2), 50% targeted thematic area 1 (Learning & Training), 42% area 2 (Healthy behaviour shaping), 7% Social Integration and 1% the “Other” category (Collective awareness). The wide majority of proposals were initiated by SMEs (74%), while teams of individuals/web entrepreneurs have been 26% (Figure 3). The proposals claimed to utilise an average of 6.44 GEs, having as maximum 20 GEs (!) and as minimum just 1 GE.
Figure 2: 1st Open Call Proposals Geographical Distribution |
Figure 3: 1st Open Call Proposals Distribution per applicant type |
For the proposals evaluation, a group of 37 experts was originally formed and finally 18 were selected. The selection was based on criteria such as technical excellence in the areas addressed by FI-ADOPT, expertise of the FIWARE technology, profession type/category, gender and nationality. Emphasis was given at the industrial background /profession (53%, from which 18% were from SMEs). In addition, 29% of the experts are from the research/academic community and 18% from the financial/business angels domain (Figure 4). The call category expertise distribution was almost equal, having many experts covering more than one area (Figure 5). In all evaluations, at least one of the evaluators was selected to have good knowledge of the FIWARE technology (Figure 6).
Figure 4: Selected Experts distribution by profession type |
Figure 5: Selected Experts distribution by call category expertise |
Figure 6: Selected Experts distribution by FIWARE knowledge |
Figure 7: Selected Experts by Gender |
Results
Overall 13 proposals have been selected. The proposals in the short list request 1.699.578€ out of the 1,7M€ that have been allocated for the 1st Open Call. The short listed proposals distribution (Figure 8) is 39% targeted to thematic area 1 (Learning & Training), 46% to thematic area 2 (Healthy behaviour shaping) and to 15% Social Integration. However, many applications state that they address social integration as 2nd in the relevance order.
Figure 8: Short listed proposals per domain |
Figure 9: Short listed proposals distribution per applicant type |
The selected proposals are 15% from web entrepreneurs and 85% from SMEs. Yet, as 31% are start-ups, we can assume that at least 46% of the short listed proposals initiated or will initiate a new businesses.
The selected applications will utilise an average of 7.85 GEs. The average funding request is 130.736 EUROs. Most of the projects plan to go into commercialization of the proposed application in less than 15 months from the project starting date, with an extra funding of less than 50.000 EUROs. The distribution per country is shown in Figure 10.
Figure 10: Geographic distribution of the short listed proposals