During the first 18 months of the OPEN DEI project, the partners worked towards strengthening the EU leadership for the implementation of an Open Reference Architecture in the four domains touched by OPEN DEI (Manufacturing, Agri-food, Healthcare, Energy in collaboration with the IAs), taking into account the multi-disciplinary approach of the DEI initiative, building a network of coordinated innovation hubs in this field and starting the implementation of the first version of the Navigator to contribute to the creation of new services, especially for SMEs.
In the meantime, partners worked towards the benchmarking tool, tracking both previous and ongoing programs and initiatives in Big Data and IoT Large Scale Pilots. The improvement of this instruments has been done in two ways, starting from a face-to-face meeting held in February 2020 for a fruitful first getting-in-touch with Pilots and collection of their feedback, and by the effective realization of the web-based survey tool to collect information regarding the projects covered by OPEN DEI and other initiatives, useful to identify gaps in the actual methodology adopted in the Innovation Actions supported by the project.
EU leadership in Digital Platforms for Industry also depends on the capability to build a network of coordinated innovation hubs in this field. During the referred months, OPEN DEI worked towards the definition of a coordinated workflows of Platform/Pilots services to grow pan-EU awareness of DT-ICT IAs, by supporting the enlargement of the ecosystem, creating a DT community across the four domains. The existing DIHs networks have been involved and, at M18, the beta version of the DIHIWARE instance for OPEN DEI has been setup and will be further improved to support an ecosystem of EU-borne digital assets (people, organisations, technologies, experiments and knowledge) and inter-IAs collaboration in the four areas and to connect with relevant DIHs in the DT domain.
The activities performed so far, have been profusely disseminated by the mean of events, webinars, position papers, and sector dedicated events. The communication & dissemination did not stop even in times of Covid-19 pandemic and the Ambassadors were able to build and nurture a network of several Working Groups and four distinct Task Forces on data sharing spaces, business ecosystem, digital platforms & pilots and business impact and KPIs.