Big data and Open Data Innovation and take-up

Specific Challenge: The activities supported under this topic address the general technological and systemic data challenges that concern entire value chains and/or bridge across borders, languages, industries and sectors. The aim is to improve the ability of European companies to build innovative multilingual data products and services, in order to turn large data volumes into semantically interoperable data assets and knowledge. The horizontal activities within LEIT on data, relevant for a wide range of sectors, will be complemented in the H2020 Societal Challenges by data-related activities addressing specific areas.

Scope:                                                

a.      Innovation Actions: proposals are expected to cover one of the themes identified below, but not both.

         One collaborative project establishing a European open data integration and reuse incubator for SMEs to foster the development of open data supply chains and to educate and assist new users.  Proposals are expected to:

-       Identify significant opportunities to establish supply chains for products and services, based on open data resources;

-       Attract the participation of European companies willing to contribute some of their own data assets as open data for experimentation or to integrate open data with their own private data as the basis for innovative applications.

-       Attract and manage SMEs interested in business or technology innovation in particular on open data.

-       Link to and reuse data from the European Union Open Data Portal or other local, regional or national Open Data portals, as well as to the CEF programme.

-       Where appropriate, link to and expand the activities of existing national/regional open data incubators.

The action may involve financial support to third parties in line with the conditions set out in Part K of the General Annexes. The consortium will define the process of SME selection for which financial support will be granted. Minimum 70% of the EU funding requested by the proposal should be allocated to this purpose.

         Collaborative projects focused on innovation and technology transfer in multilingual data harvesting and analytics solutions and services. The projects should have a cross-sectorial, cross-border and/or cross-lingual scope, and take into account the users' and societal perspectives. The driver in consortia should be a core of companies dedicated to focused activities with a clear business perspective with verifiable milestones and market validation.

b.      Coordination and Support Actions

         To lay the foundation for effective exchange and reuse of data assets (including those controlled by the data subject) across: industry sectors, national boundaries and language barriers, public and private sectors. Proposals are expected to:

-       Define the legal/contractual framework that would foster the exchange of data assets and set up pilots of a self-sustaining data market;

-       Attract and involve players from all parts of the data value chain and representing different sectors and markets;

-       Implement a close clustering mechanism with projects arising from the last bullet point of activity a), involving them in experiments, data reuse pilots, business case workshops etc. and taking input from them in designing the legal framework and infrastructure.

         To contribute to capacity-building by designing and coordinating a network of European skills centres for big data analytics technologies and business development. The network is expected to identify knowledge/skills gaps in the European industrial landscape and produce effective learning curricula and documentation to train large numbers of European data analysts and business developers, capable of (co)operating across national borders on the basis of a common vision and methodology.

         To create a Big Data integrator platform with the objective to coordinate and consolidate relevant technology and user communities in any actions supported in Horizon 2020 addressing or making use of Big Data.

Expected impact:

         Enhanced access to and value generation on (public and private sector) open data resulting in hundreds of multilingual applications reusing tens of billions of open data records used by millions of European citizens.

         Viable cross-border, cross-lingual and cross-sector data supply chains involving hundreds of European actors in a robust and growing ecosystem capable of generating sizable revenues for all the actors involved and SMEs in particular.

         Tens of business-ready innovative data analytics solutions deployed by European companies in global markets.

         Availability of deployable educational material for data scientists and data workers and thousands of European data professionals trained in state-of-the-art data analytics technologies and capable of (co)operating in cross-border, cross-lingual and cross-sector European data supply chains.

         Effective networking and consolidation of Big Data user and contributor communities, technology providers and other relevant stakeholders across all challenges and across the three pillars of Horizon 2020.

Types of action:

a.       Innovation Actions – A mix of proposals requesting Small and Large contributions are expected

b.      Coordination and Support Actions