Background. Digital Living International Ltd (later Digital Living), an innovative ICT development company wanted to explore leading edge blockchain technology to complement existing platform technology. INNOSUP-02-2016 call, the SME-led pilot programme for innovation capacity building action, looked for visionary SMEs to be supported for employing a highly-skilled experienced researcher (referred to as an 'Innovation Associate' or IA) for one year. The main idea was that with the associate, these SMEs would be able to explore the potential of their innovative idea and turn it into an innovation project.
Problem. Digital Living develops solutions to take full advantage of data economy and to create platforms where data from different sources can be combined and used for innovative service products. The platform creates digital twins of physical assets and identities and needs to ensure that data and identities can be trusted. Trust on the validity of data available online is a key issue in digitalization or platformatization, and it is necessary to make sure that the latest technology is trusted by the end users.
Solution. Blockchain technology is a new data architecture technology, which creates programmed trust for ecosystems. It provides new innovative business models by reducing third parties and inefficiencies. It also has the ability to provide transparency, access and inclusion. The technology is being used in many pilot projects, but there is still too little practical knowledge of the different ways it could technically be used, and how it could improve platform services. Digital Living has studied the feasibility of the blockchain technology within the financial sector platformatization project which demands for highly trusted data management. Further on, the studies on the business strategy of the company yielded an innovation project proposal in the eHeath sector where the demand for trusted data is also high.
Societal importance. Data is the fuel of emerging technologies, such as AI, AR and VR. Digital Living’s key technology, LifeEngine, provides data exchange on a platform by making data interoperable, mapping and linking data, and providing identities to real life assets and people. The company has been working as a collaborative networked organisation on open innovation with large organizations in the FinTech and built-environment markets. The company has a larger effort in digitalization than what the size of the company prerequisites. Digital Living enables a holistic approach to the knowledge and service creation from data by looking the entire process from the creation of data to the end of the chain of operations in data transformation. The focus is to combine data from different sources in order to be best able to serve any types of end-users in society. It is of large importance to be able to improve trust on data validity and transactions in these platforms and to explore new service models that digitalization enables.
Overall objectives. Digital Living needed to complement its expertise with knowledge in blockchain technology for secured Real Time Economy in cloud, both for providing applications to any client, and also for piloting the DEEP (Digital Enterprise Ecosystem Platform) business plan created as an open innovation project with a FinTech client.
Digital Living hired an Innovation Associate with skills in building blockchain strategy and roadmap for our company and for commercialisation of our product: the LifeEngine trusted linked data platform together with the data operator backbone technology.
The objective of integrating the IA as a part of the organisation was smoothly going while working on the client assignment project related tasks. The IA aimed and worked for opening up opportunities for innovation and significant growth for the company. She succeeded to initiate and propose for funding an innovation project, but in the case of failure the objective for a further employment of the IA was not possible to implement while for time being Digital Living works on project basis.
