Among the A16 Accelerator Programme that has been promoting the adoption of the FIWARE technical resources and assets, FI-ADOPT has distinguished its activity by focusing on certain areas where the development and impact of present and future solutions and digital services will be deeply determined by the integration of Open Source technologies: establishing and supporting continuous corporate and citizen’s learning and training; promoting and facilitating healthy behavioral dynamics and wellbeing shaping among the society and finally easing social and cultural integration.

We already know that FIWARE is not only about using the technology, but also about the creation of a community. During the FI-ADOPT acceleration period, the focus sustained by the accelerator was in learning and training and within a social impact scope. It linked the use of the technology with the employment of the richest media available, boundless networking and the utilization of portability and gaming principles to the developed apps, to easily appeal and engage the users and customers.

After three open calls, FI-ADOPT is now approaching the end of its lifecycle as an A16 accelerator. Recently, Theodore Zahariadis – Synelixis Solutions co-founder and Member of the FI-ADOPT consortium, shared some of the outcomes resulting from the almost completed process; some statistics related to the created impact provided by the direct feedback of the accelerated SMEs or just made public by them. Outcomes and figures that are, in fact, quite impressive:

• By January 2015, at the beginning of the acceleration phase, the income from activities related to FI-ADOPT of the top-15 companies accounted for a global sum of 104.000€. Towards the end of the acceleration and excluding any direct funding from the accelerator, the income from activities related to FI-ADOPT reached 1.780.000€ by April 2016. That is an increase of a 1700% in 15 months. By the end of this year, the estimation is that, for each 1€ spent by FI-ADOPT, additionally 1.5€ to 1.7€ will be created.
• The number of jobs in activities related to FI-ADOPT in the top-15 companies at the beginning of the acceleration was 24. By the end of the acceleration it was 62. That is an increase in jobs of over a 258% in just 15 months. Projections for the end of 2016 indicate around 80-85 full-time employees in these 15 companies alone.
• In the top-15 FI-ADOPT companies, income per employee has significantly increased from an average of 4,334€/emp. to 28,710€/emp, providing a solid foundation for the already created jobs to sustain well after the end of FI-ADOPT.
• Regarding the B2C market, the top-5 FI-ADOPT companies started with 22.300 registered users. Now, they have already exceeded 950.000 users, from which more than 420.000 are involved in activities directly related to FI-ADOPT.
• And about the B2B market, five companies are already offering their FI-ADOPT related products on the market, and have been raising their paying customers’ customer base from only 2 paying customers at the beginning of the acceleration to 263 now.
• At this moment, three of the groups of individuals, who submitted a proposal, were converted to startup companies. The creation of SMEs through the enlargement of previously solo projects have already reached Italy –Seides s.r.l. supporting the Foodways market-place and community–, Poland –Memo24­– and Israel –noviQr–.
• Five FI-ADOPT supported companies have already received 550K€ from additional private funding. Two of them have been partially acquired –the amount has not been disclosed– and two additional companies are in the process of raising funding from Venture Capitals.
• In addition, three companies have received 377K€ from additional public funding and three companies will submit proposals in June 2016 requesting in total 1.44M€ additional funds.

Given the social reach intended by the projects under this accelerator –most of the FI-ADOPT business models are based on free users’ access­– let’s have a further look at the three companies with more registered users.

• Leverade claims to be the best app to organize sport leagues and championships, providing an online competition manager that allows anyone to create a tournament in a matter of minutes. It’s aimed at professional federations and associations, councils that want to manage their entire sport services, amateur players who want to organize a private league or sport facilities which want to make the most of their capacities. It has achieved a remarkable success thanks to its simplicity and wholeness: it can take up to 60% less time to manage a league using Leverade, and it allows communication with hundreds of thousands of people in a competition with a single click, thus turning a competition into an active and cohesive community.​
• GoSpeaky started in the tiny, but strongly multilingual and multicultural Belgium. Stating how difficult is to get a job there and make it till the end of your studies if you don’t have a certain level in a foreign language, the founding team  detected that often a certificated level differed from the language proficiency achieved by a student. It is by contacting with native speakers –and by discovering new cultures– how that student would finally start speaking fluently. If schools don’t teach a language in the effective way that native speakers do, why shouldn’t that be acknowledged and used in the best interest of billions of people around the world? The most recent technologies have enabled this project to rapidly establish a growing language exchange community. After a modest start and through the support of the Acceleration Programme, GoSpeaky is now becoming a global brand and a worldwide community of hundreds of thousands of language learners.
• Documenta Creaciones Multimedia Avanzadas propose a revolutionary concept: to accompany the learning process with the development of a digital  portfolio for each student, a livelong e-portfolio that will be the basis around which a creative and audiovisual ecosystem will be unfolding. This organized ecosystem will be following each student from Primary to University, offering new communication possibilities and collaborative tools, and also engaging teachers and schools. MyDocumenta is preparing its breakthrough with the starting point of the next school year in mind: September 2016 will be the launch point of the new Portability App, presented as “the new platform to create your content and edutainment”, meaning the merge of the already structured in-school educational path, with the use of ICT technologies to support that process from within a game/reward perspective.

Those three projects sum to more than 870.000 users in total –at least 392.000 users directly related to FI-ADOPT activities. To them, and to all the SMEs, startups, developers and entrepreneurs that have joined the FIWARE community as part of the FI-ADOPT acceleration engine, we wish the best of luck and, as part of our ecosystem, we will be happy to keep sharing their success stories.