MIDIH focused on several areas going beyond the state of the art, providing the three main Unique Selling Points of MIDIH.
1. Networks of DIHs and related Business Model: Many European initiatives are inventorying DIHs as individual autonomous entities, some of them also developing a socio-business evaluation framework. MIDIH has contributed to improve this scenario by boosting collaboration and knowledge exchange among them, fostering the adoption of a five-dimensional framework, given by the following categorization of ECOSYSTEM, TECHNOLOGY, BUSINESS, SKILLS and DATA DIH services. To this end and to support an effective exploitation of the real value provided by operating a network of DIHs, the MIDIH Consortium has developed driving principles, both at technical and business level. In this perspective, along the whole project timespan, the MIDIH Consortium has continuously worked to define a pan-European network of multidisciplinary services to be offered by the “MIDIH Marketplace”, now represented by the main joint exploitation vehicle named DIH4Industry. By the end of the project, the MIDIH Consortium has gone ahead with establishing this virtuous mechanism to help DIHs to provide locally support to their customers to innovate, even exploiting synergies with other H2020 actions, such as AI REGIO and HUBCAP, as well as other Europe wide initiatives. Finally, a new “DIH Innovation Management and Sustainability Model” has been analysed with the aim to define an open innovation framework driving the MIDIH Innovation Strategy, covering a) access to technology needs, through the support of the CCs covering the different CPS/IoT technologies, and b) access to market needs. The proposed approach is digitally supported by the above mentioned DIH4Industry initiative.
2. Aligning Reference Architectures: MIDIH has proposed reference implementations in three main gran-scenario identified (namely Smart Product, Smart Factory and Smart Supply Chain) based on the defined MIDIH Open Source Reference Architecture. This categorization, and the corresponding architectural building blocks, have been validated in the industrial experiments (both by the lighthouse projects in the project lighthouses and by the 32 Open Call winners). The final work on this pillar has been mainly oriented towards the integration of new capabilities, mainly focusing on improve connectivity and interoperability among the different systems/solutions located at Shoop-floor, in order provide AI-enabled Data Analytics capabilities. In sum, thanks to project activities, the existing MIDIH network of CCs and DIHs has been able to support manufacturing SMEs to uptake, implement and use advanced CPS/IoT components in order to implement their Digital Transformation journey.
3. Conducting cross-border industrial experimentations: with the help of the two waves of Open Calls the MIDIH Consortium has realized 32 successful experiments, registering a good success of industrial participation, despite the complexity of managing the experiments in this pandemic context. In the project, the whole Consortium (technology providers, end users, Competence Centers and DIHs) have worked in synergy to carry out a critical mass of cross-border experiments, bringing together different key actors along the full value chain to customize the CPS/IoT technologies according to the requirements of the users.
