Shortening product development cycles
SMEs often have limited ability to innovate on their own, but may be more successful working with other SMEs. However, SMEs often face difficulty collaborating, particularly in terms of finding partners and developing products. The 'Rapid application innovation for SMEs' (RAISME) project aims to help SMEs collaborate and shorten their product development cycles. Specifically, RAISME will help SMEs rapidly build and scale up computer applications. The project set out to provide a data processing platform to allow the exploitation of new algorithm and visualisation technologies. The overall goal is to extend the capacity of SMEs to develop and integrate cloud platforms and identify new business models. Project members began with a review of technologies to establish the project's platform requirements and architecture. Next, the project produced its first prototype, which was demonstrated to all partners who then provided feedback. The initial prototype demonstrated the feasibility of the concept. However, numerous limitations were discovered, and the project worked to iron them out. The second prototype, with improved architecture, showed a broad range of improvements, especially in terms of ease of deployment, identity management and data visualisation. It also included a wireframe user interface. The developments incorporated a semantic framework, built on the matchmaker service developed by the EU project ALIVE. Project dissemination work includes a website, brochure and presentation at one training event. The project's functional prototype integrates services provided by SMEs into a platform that provides users with access to powerful processing algorithms. The RAISME platform provides tools for the analysis and visualisation of complex data, which will have a role in analysis of business data and the provision of services.
