"During the Phase 1 of H2020-SME Instrument, we have performed several main actions in order to assess and consolidate our business plan, including marketing, technical and Operational aspects.
1. From a marketing point of view, we have better examined, segmented and measured our market, which is growing strongly worldwide (over 15% a year for the next eight years), and we setup our goal is to conquer a slice of this new market, betting on our innovative technology. A first positioning of our offering (to be considered a starting point for phase 2) has been realised in the segment of ""Offline"" market applications, i.e. applications working on images of existing manuscripts, rather than text acquisition while writing (""Online applications""). Within the Offline segment, the four most promising application fields was identified: Educational & Literature, Enterprise management, Manufacturing, Healthcare. As an objective of phase 2, it is our intention to address each of these four application fields with a specific vertical solution. The business model to apply will be implemented as distribution network based in some European and non European Countries plus an Internet channel, aimed at selling the Vertical Applications on a monthly license fee basis. Tailored solutions projects addressing special customers requirements and an SDK package for developers purposes, will complete the offering portfolio. During phase 1 a first generic communication plan was drafted.
2. From a technical point of view, we have designed and developed a prototype infrastructure, aimed at demonstrating our technology in industrially relevant environment (TRL 6). The best technical HW-SW environments and application scenarios have been selected through a specific assessment activity and three service lines have been envisaged, namely: historical form processing, contemporary form processing and postal form processing. Some Hw equipment such as smart glasses, scanners and Hi-resolution cameras have been tested, in order to check both performances and user friendliness features.
We also had the opportunity to setup technical tests and demos with several public and private organizations and companies, especially with owners of historical handwritten collections that provide us samples of data. The results of these demos were very promising in the sense that we have obtained some evidence of the need of public and private organizations to automatically manage their handwritten digital archives and their needs to invest resources first in the digitalization of their paper collection and then on effective management of these huge digital archives. Some test session was also carried out on non Latin alphabets (mainly Japanese logographic), achieving a first positive results. Work on this topic is currently on going.
3. From an operational point of view, the phase 1 business plan was reviewed and an assessment was carried out concerning the expected impact in terms of turnover, employees, costs and margins. A Risk analysis was also carried out, mainly aimed at facing potential difficulties in organizing and effectively manage large-scale dissemination and exploitation, as well as the difficulties to face a very rapid growth (overtrading). During this step, an analysis concerning the possibility of establishing a Joint Venture or a Spin-Off with other companies operating into the same market segment (external growth) was also explored. In order to achieve this last result, some brokerage activities have been performed, among which the most relevant is the attendance to the event organised by the Business Acceleration Services of European Commission at Hannover Fair. This was a great opportunity for our company to meet several potential partners interested in possible future technological and commercial partnerships."
