During the first year of the project, the main activities concentrated on the definition of business scenarios for the individual use case sectors: White and Brown Goods, Healthcare Products, Clothing Textiles and High-tech Products. As a first step, Product-Service Systems in each business scenario were defined. Then, AS-IS and TO-BE scenarios including the involved actors were developed. Based on this formalisation of the AS-IS and TO-BE scenarios, the technical and non-technical requirements for the FALCON Virtual Open Platform (FALCON VOP) were derived for each TO-BE scenario.
The second year of the project saw the detailed architecture of FALCON VOP specified according to a refined set of requirements and interaction analyses stemming from the development of a more granular definition of business stories within each business scenario. To better communicate the planned features and functionality of the FALCON VOP to non-technical partners, paper-based mock-ups of the Graphical User Interface (GUI) were created for each front-end module. This allowed the further development of the FALCON VOP to follow an agile and iterative approach.
Work in the final period of the project was concentrated on the finalisation and evaluation of five demonstrators for four business scenarios. The objectives of the evaluation were not only to verify the functionalities of the FALCON VOP, but also to validate their usefulness to each business scenario and to evaluate their added value for (re-)designing PSS. Evaluation showed that their expectations towards the FALCON VOP were mainly fulfilled, and that the platform is user-friendly and increases efficiency in business-related data analysis and collaboration in PSS (re-)design processes. The outcomes of the evaluation were documented as a set of lessons learned for the refinement and further development of the FALCON VOP.
The overall results of the FALCON project are encouraging based on the joint evaluation of the four business scenarios. The FALCON VOP is perceived to offer a high level of gains in each of the business scenarios and holds very promising value propositions.
The FALCON VOP is the result of a research project and as such, the maturity of some parts needs to be increased for market deployment. Nevertheless, the majority of the business scenarios achieved their objectives and the added value generated by the FALCON VOP as well as the improvement of business processes has been validated. The overall solution is ready to be applied as it is, if early adopters show direct interest. On top of that, the evaluation yielded interesting starting points for improvements to the FALCON VOP for the post project-phase.
From the beginning of the project, the FALCON consortium accompanied the research and development process with a methodological exercise towards development of joint and individual exploitation plans of the FALCON VOP. These activities developed a number of Innovative Exploitable Assets (IEAs) and a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and facilitated a discussion focussed on the generation of value for all participants in the project.
The following three phases were identified as steps to ensure viable business development:
- Exploitation Stage 1 relates to the finalisation of pre-industrialization of the components necessary to build the FALCON MVP.
- Exploitation Stage 2 will focus on adapting the offer to the needs of the market. Therefore, dissemination will aim at testing the main assumptions about the FALCON value proposition and helping to fine tune the platform and its functionalities.
- Exploitation Stage 3 will start when the Value Proposition is sufficiently strong to shift the effort to business development. All lessons learned from Stage 2 will be captured in the new dissemination material and communication kit. In total, the intensity of dissemination will be reinforced and focused on the main targets, not only potential customers, but also experts, opinion leaders, complementary software editors and added value resellers.
