The feasibility exercise helped enormously gather market and customer understanding to design a much better value proposition. The main takeaways were:
1) Market development study: So far, we have developed our system with training data gathered from Northern European countries. Entering new markets outside Northern Europe requires additional training data to refine our AI.To find the next market for our smart infrastructure device, we set the following requirements: (1) the market should have high risk perception among road users, and (2) be suitable with our (B2G-oriented) business model.Our initial hypothesis was to enter Italy and/or Spain but on further investigation, these countries did not meet our set market requirements. Considering all the set requirements, Croatia (HR) fit our needs the best. We short-listed the most suitable contacts and approached them with a proposal for technology evaluation. Among interested entities, the municipality of Tisno marked interest, and signed an agreement with Bercman to evaluate our technology. In order to achieve a lower price for the mass-produced commercial product, we interviewed experts to determine the most desired features to be able to offer a more affordable base configuration. We also determined that SPC needs a more modular design to be able to be implemented on existing roadside infrastructure, which is currently not fulfilled with our design and needs to be optimised during the EIC Accelerator project.
2) We set an optimal IP strategy considering our future markets.We reached the initial conclusion that Bercman is a young startup company and costs are an important factor as we go forward. It was decided that most of the IP would be protected under the company’s internal know-how (trade secrets). For future reference, we concluded that for a small company like Bercman, it is better to put all your eggs in one basket than to become involved in litigation in numerous jurisdictions. Thus, the geographical scope of our future patent applications from our inventions is geared towards our main target markets.
3) The business plan development task resulted in a validated strategy for overcoming the major market entry hurdles. We added a new revenue stream to service the growing “As-a-Service” business approach if needed. Accordingly, we adjusted our country-specific go-to-market strategies and clarified the required competences and resources. Analysing the targeted markets, we validated that these markets are focused on furthering their Smart City developments. We also determined potential risks through the feasibility study and lined out the preliminary mitigation measures to ensure successful commercialisation.
Ultimately, the collected insights and data gave us the confidence to take the next step in the road towards the market, which we expect to reach late 2022 or early 2023.
