A Genetic Data CUBE - An innovative business model applied to predictive and prescriptive analytics, exploring Big Data and empowering cloud-services and urgent computation

Project Information

GDC

Grant agreement ID: 697581

DOI 10.3030/697581

Closed project

EC signature date 3 August 2015

Start date 1 September 2015

End date 29 February 2016

Funded under

• SOCIETAL CHALLENGES - Europe In A Changing World - Inclusive, Innovative And Reflective Societies

Total cost € 71 429,00

EU contribution € 50 000,00

Coordinated by

X23 SRL
Italy

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - GDC (A Genetic Data CUBE - An innovative business model applied to predictive and prescriptive analytics, exploring Big Data and empowering cloud-services and urgent computation)

Reporting period: 2015-09-01 to 2016-02-29

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

“GDC+” is the first world-class Data System empowering multiple services in the field of advanced Business Intelligence and (high-performative) Decision Making process, with the ultimate goal to facilitate large enterprises or industries, as well as SMEs, investors, professionals, experts in several specialistic fields, and citizens in diagnosing and solving relevant business problems, issues or specific challenges.
Business Intelligence, Decision Making Processing, Predictive Analytics for economic and financial forecasting represent today a brick and mortar set of tools and methodologies to support important business functions for investing purposes (both from businesses as well as investors side), storing customer information, marketing analysis and related tracking activities.

The scope of our business innovation project is to introduce our novel solution - “GDC+” - into the market for successful commercialization. “GDC+” is dedicated to Big Data Analytics market sector, which stand at the forefront to Data Management for economic and financial forecasting. To have a crystal-clear picture of the business opportunity in the market, 90% of the data in the digital world has been created in the last 2 years alone.
Big Data Market will top $84B in 2026, attaining a 17% Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) for the forecast period 2011 to 2026.
The business opportunity is huge, market is highly lucrative and monetization is realistic.

To achieve our scope and to validate the consolidated assumptions both as regard business model as well as technical functional points, we conducted a Feasibility Study (FS) to identify the following priorities

A. Technical feasibility of the framework;
B. Economic viability (priority level): confirming the hypothesis related to the present business model as well as the GDC+ potentials to penetrate the European domain; this enabled us to elaborate a sound Business Plan (BP) as route to successfully entering the market.

Starting from these two priorities the specific objectives of the FS were the following:

▶ Technical feasibility of the framework:
● Testing the actual prototype efficiency in order to:
a. evaluate the question answering capacity;
b. determine/refine the technical requirements to be used;
c. observe how GDC cope with current industrial needs;
d. set the ideal balance between the NLP technologies and the experts activity;
e. fine-tune the Hybrid Network of Networks (HNNs) framework on the best performance rates.

▶ Economic viability (priority level)
● To understand the potential of the market penetration within the EU domain:
a. to analyse the EU market potentials [benchmarking; surveys/interviewers];
b. to identify critical success factors in order to allow the framework to enter the European Big Data, Data Analytics, Business Intelligence market sectors (in particular as regard Health and BFSI segment);
c. to validate the assumptions related to the actual business model put in place;
d. to identify and compare costs/benefits streams;
e. to develop an advanced Economic Analysis (Budgeting and Sensitivity Analysis).


▶ The outcomes of the FS are be the following:

1. to pioneer an innovative business model applied to Business Intelligence, Decision Making Processing, Predictive Analysis for economic and financial forecasting;
2. validation of the assumptions related to technical functional points of GDC+ to forthcoming evolutive prototyping and further demonstration in real environments (to be conducted in SME Ph 2) to reach market-maturity.

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

During the past 6 months we proceeded on with the assessment of the technical, operational and economic viability of “GDC+”, as core action of the SME Ph1 objective.
The activities carried out to assess the project dealt with the following:
▶ Economic viability (priority level, strategic to the Ph1 objective): confirming the hypothesis related to the present Business Model as well as the “GDC+” potentials to penetrate the European domain; this enabled us to elaborate a Business Plan (BP) as route to successfully enter the market.
▶ Technical feasibility of the framework (secondary level);


At business and operational level, we carried out a series of activities investigating core issues as regard market, potential customers, key partners, key distribution channels, IPR issues as well as promotion and dissemination activities.

Step #1: we conducted a sound in-house market research analysis, resulting in the identification of market potentials, relevant industry applications, target audiences;
Step #2: we carried out a detailed customer segmentation, resulting in a crystal-clear scenario of our target groups, archetype personas and related “gains&pains”;
Step #3: we consolidated our Business Model and revenue model, enabling us to assess and fine-tune our market penetration strategy and to define costs/benefits stream;
Step #4: we elaborated our marketing strategy (market penetration strategy, policy price), including promotion and communication activities to engage users/customers, resulting in a first pre-commercialisation plan.
Step #5: we intensified our on-going relevant partnerships with key-players (still on-going), resulting in robust relationships facilitating the market entry;
Step #6: we conducted a detailed IPR study and regulatory investigation, resulting in the assessment of a first complete IPR management plan.


On a technical level, we tested the actual prototype efficiency as follow.
Step #1: Tests for validating the question answering capacity performed together with BancaSella Holding (specific skills in financials), University of Salerno (specific skills in informatics, linguistics, data analysis), University of Reggio Emilia (DISMI, Sciences and Methods of Engineering – specific skills in Big Data Dynamics, Analytics, Intelligence), EBAN (specific interest in morphological analysis, network dynamics, multi-dimensional problem solving approach, decision making matrix and solutions), e-Residency (specific capacity in e-governance, secure identity management, security/privacy issues, decentralised services). The validation of tests and performance was achieved through reiterated routines, routing analytics, and circulation of ad-hoc surveys.

Step #2: Periodic internal (X23 lab) tests to further assess the technical feasibility of the framework and validate main functional points (technical requirements/functional points). As a result, screening bugs and implementation issues, were checked, validated.

Step #3: “GDC+” features and functions on-going testing to cope with current industrial needs. The results of these activities allowed us to understand wether the innovative mechanism, as well as the novel hybrid (human~machine, unstructured~structured) approach of “GDC+”, can provide tangible added value to our potential users/customers. This is extremely important when our framework is applied and used within the industrial and financial domain [private equity, investment sectors, bank system, quantitative finance, real economy], as well as other (crucial) fields where sub-granularity of data analytics in process, multidimensional scaling, high frequency secure transactions, decentralisation of services and systems, blockchain technology, are requested. In particular, we applied further specific routines, factor analysis, model checking, validation tests to: healthcare sector, and the market field of “complex integrated, data-driven digital-tourism” (—> see in the next paragraphs)], where customer intelligence can disrupt the entire value-chain.

Step #4: Through the cooperation with the above mentioned partners, we validated the capacity of “GDC+” in exploiting unstructured Big Data processing, and the powerful integration with the human layer of “hounds” (human-ware>against

Results achieved so far: Technical Assessment (TA) and Economic Feasibility Analysis (EFA) resulted in the actual stage of “GDC+” framework which is organised in several components.
The intense work carried out and the outcomes achieved showed us that we will have to refine a few mid-term targets at both commercial and technical level to be further implemented in the SME Ph2 project, i.e.:

● Transaction(s) High Frequency(-ies) [specific ranges to improve]; HCP - High Computational Performances [Urgent Computing for Decision Support in Critical Situations; (some types of-) Data Uncertainty; (private) Repositories Standards]; NLP Analytical Models, Text Analysis, Text Mining, Unstructured and Semi-Structured Data Parsing, Transformation, Integration Process; GUI (Graphic User Interface), AUI / ABUI (Advanced (Behavioural) User Interface) Tools; Algorithms – Heuristic Analysis with Behavioural Whitelisting, Meta-heuristics, Genetic;
● Experts involvement, Network Spread Index – (assessment), improving measures, gamification methodology, spillover effects, Internationalisation Spread Index (assessment);
● Block-chain technology – fully integration of probabilistic transactions, nano-transactions, Bitcoin (crypto-currencies) enabling payment(s), security-protected billing and transactions, sub-granular and “dust” dynamics, crypto-mashup.

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)

The Feasibility assessment and the results achieved during the recent 6 months activities definitively confirmed both the technical, operational as well the economic viability of our proposed innovation.

The work carried out was instrumental to plan and assess the progress needed on both economic, operational and technical level to reach market maturity. We have already set up our strategic and implementation plan to be carried out in the forthcoming 18 months, according to an accurate operational plan for the crucial activities to put in place to demonstrate our business model and innovative character in real conditions.

The study conducted up to date definitively confirmed a strong market demand as well as potential customers willing to pay for our innovative solution. We now have a clear understanding of our “archetype persona”, their needs, demands, expectations and how our solution will be able to meet this needs.
On top of this, a relevant output of the feasibility assessment resulted in the opportunity to improve the actual “virtual currency” component included in our framework, shifting to a most disruptive technology, i.e. the blockchain technology linking to smart contracts and crypto currency. This ultimately represents a relevant added value for “GDC+” framework adoption and wide expansion plan in the medium-long term, with manifold impacts on an economic, industry and social level.

The feedback collected from our industrial partners. stakeholders and third parties as well as our potential end-users/customers in these past months helped us to better understand the demands from our targeted users, so that GUI, ease-of-use and timely responsive capacity of the tools provided by GDC+ will be of paramount importance to engage potential customers.
Also here, the introduction of blockchain technologies will have a consistent impact on the evolutive GDC+ features to be further developed in the forthcoming 18 months of work, in particular considering the pace of innovation within the IoT scenario, booming the flow of data.
This is particularly true for unstructured data [i.e. text files, speeches and morpho-syntactics natural items, power points, word documents, instant messages (tweets, likes, posts), emails, web pages, jpeg images, audio files and videos] which are very hard to quantify, they cannot be counted in numbers.

GDC+ capacity to tackle this challenge will have relevant impacts on industry and economic level:
- for X23 as a company in terms of growth and market dominance;
- for the potential customers, to monetize the value of information (Return on Information) thus demanding fro enterprise systems able to control the data and the access it as needed;
- for the EU, increasing the competitiveness of the EU SMEs and large companies, resulting in social and economic benefits (jobs creation; economic growth).

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