The workshop, woven into the progress meeting, took place on 25 September. It was put together and delivered by CITyFiED partner Steinbeis-Europa-Zentrum who is in charge of exploitation and market deployment.
One of the major challenges of demonstration projects like CITyFiED is to fully capitalise on the work undertaken and ensure outreach and replication on a vast scale. In short, the project has to sell, it has to breed. Now this could be a bit of tall order without a sound exploitation and market deployment mechanism built into the project’s framework. And so it is here that Steinbeis-Europa-Zentrum steps in, drawing on its long track record in promoting RTD programmes and supporting cross-border technology transfer.
The workshop, conducted by Teresa Puerta and Valerie Bahr, was a savvy mix of briefings and exercises for delegates. It threw the latter into the deep end of what exploitation actually entails both for themselves, and others and for the project itself, and it enabled each person to get to grips with intellectual property issues and to better cater for the diversity of partners and their strategic positions within the project.
The audience were introduced to the Business Model Canvas, a strategic management and operational tool used as a template for marketing and deployment. Merging this into their hands-on workshop, the first of a series of three planned in the course of the project, Teresa and Valerie took their colleagues on the journey from exploitable results – known as outcomes – to deployment plan, visiting everything in-between – value propositions, revenues streams, key resources, unique selling propositions... to name but a few.
The focus of the first exploitation workshop was on identifying background (pre-existing knowledge brought by each participant to the project), foreground (knowledge generated during the execution of the project) and exploitable results (project results which may be used e.g. at an economic or academic level after the project). The main take-away from this workshop was a more specific definition of products and services from CITyFiED. In particular, the workshop has provided a basis for putting together integrated building retrofitting strategies and tools for the various marketing targets such as building owners, engineers, energy suppliers, construction companies, municipalities and, as far as they are involved in the decision and implementation process of building retrofitting, the building occupiers meaning the general public.