To achieve our goals, during the last 6 months, we focused on many aspects of our business. An initial change was done at the businness strategy : in our project proposal we defined two different lines of products : (i) line A, more expensive and partially custom made, designed for urban farming ; (ii) and line B, cheaper, industrialized and specifically designed as intensive floating farming units, to adress the issue of food security in specific areas such as the Arabic Peninsula. However, after a preliminary study, we abandoned this second line to focus entirely on the urban farming activity. In fact it represents a large and promising market, that was well matching with the values offered by JFB, and decided to define an industrialization plan for a higher-quality high-efficiency sustainable cultivation module: We chose not to measure against food security because to really influence this issue huge scale installations are needed. For this kind of installations the main problems are logistics and costs.
We chose to focus on a market niche, which is the production of fresh vegetables in the urban environment of post-industrial cities. At the current stage of development of the product post-industrial cities is a market more easily accessible for us, because: (i) they have easy access to technology and knowledge to maintain and manage JFB; (ii) there is more and more interest and culture about the benefit of urban agriculture ; (iii) there is no need of huge scale installations, but of small-medium size solutions.
To enter in such market, it is very important to understand the UPA dynamics and the main issue to deal with is the integration of our solution within the built environment, and the proposition of different benefits to a vast amount of players, able to produce both social and economic impact.
The small size of Jellyfish Barge, the materials it uses and its aesthetic quality are all factors that are beneficial to promote our product in the urban context.
During these six months of project activities we joined the accelerator programme of the USA Pavillon at Expo 2015. Being the USA leader in the urban faming market, we measured our value in this context thanks to a tailored coaching and comparing our product with other potential competitors. We also partecipated to an Acceleration Program at I3P incubator of Polytechnic of Turin that allowed us to identify and build alliances with strategic partners and we worked with the University of Toronto Global Executive MBA, joining an international expertise team, to perform an in deep study of some aspects of our business model.
Furthermore, we were able to promote and test the impact of our installations in an urban context, and we built did a second improved pilot installation in the Darsena of Milan during Expo 2015. Our installation attracted over 10.000 visitors during its 2 months of opening and posed us on privileged visibility position. This, together with the several participation to internationale events around Expo, gave us a lot of visibility and helped us to built a profitable network on contacts that are now very useful for the further implementation of our businness.
