HitSeed application for the Horizon 2020 dedicated SME Instrument - Phase 1 2014. September 2014.

Project Information

HitSeedSME-1-09-14

Grant agreement ID: 663008

DOI

10.3030/663008

Project closed

EC signature date 20 January 2015

Start date 1 December 2014

End date 31 May 2015

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies - Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)

Total cost

€ 71 429,00

EU contribution

€ 50 000,00

Coordinated by

HITSEED OY
Finland

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - HitSeedSME-1-09-14 (HitSeed application for the Horizon 2020 dedicated SME Instrument - Phase 1 2014. September 2014.)

Reporting period: 2014-12-01 to 2015-05-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Internet of Things (also called Industrial Internet or Internet of Everything) is a megatrend impacting the world significantly within the next 20 years. To meet the huge growth expectations, the time, cost and competency requirements must go drastically down and barriers to entry need to be lowered. This is the customer problem and the related business opportunity HitSeed is addressing.
HitSeed is a new Finnish company founded in 2012 focusing on the development of connected hardware products that combine electronics, software, design, and connectivity. HitSeed has developed a revolutionary hardware and software platform, Seedling, to accelerate and optimize the product development of both IoT and wearable devices. This feasibility study focused on further defining the business opportunity especially in the Internet of Things – space.
The objectives and performed actions for the feasibility study were:
1. Identify the most potential IoT domains and customer categories for Seedling IoT platform
2. Define the minimum viable product (MVP), further modification needs to the existing Seedling product, and do a design study
3. Assess the business opportunity and competition thoroughly and create an elaborated business plan
4. Prepare a pilot for the Seedling platform with a customer in the IoT domain

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Feasibility study effort focused on studying the commercial feasibility of our Seedling hardware platform as well as developed the concept further to better fit the market opportunity. As part of the effort, we also developed our business thinking further.
The following objectives and activities were conducted in this study as the the main bulk of effort:
• Objective 1; IoT domain and customer category identification, focused on identifying opportunities for our Seedling platform, where the IoT platform has potential to disrupt the market or at least to provide significant additional value.
• Objective 2, minimum viable product (MVP) definition and a design study, focused on developing a revised version of our platform based on collected customer requirements.
• Objective 3, business opportunity assessment and business plan creation, focused on understanding customer demands, partnering landscape and business validation, as well as revised revenue, cost and profit estimates.
• Objective 4, customer pilot preparation, focused on validating the outcomes with customers.

The main physical outcome of the feasibility study, HitSeed’s SeedNode IoT-platform, is presented more in detail in HitSeed's SeedNode Product Brief available from HitSeed.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

We expect our IoT platform to become a major building block for European and global IoT solutions that continuously evolves ahead of its competition for power- and cost-efficient IoT Node computing. At the same time our platform promotes European technology (e.g. microcontrollers, software) towards global markets. Our anticipation is that in three year's time HitSeed's personnel will grow to around 20 persons with much larger indirect employee impact.

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