The RethinkAction Project aims to develop end-user products and services for stakeholders and citizens to support climate adaptation and mitigation. In this sense, RethinkAction puts citizens and decision-makers at the core of climate action, by developing a cross sectoral user-friendly decision-making platform tailored to the needs of different end-users. The tool will eventually deliver clear and valuable information on climate change, increase awareness and attractiveness for mitigation and adaptation solutions centered on land use as a key driver to sustain life and to reach objectives in the context of climate change.
During the RethinkAction Project, RINA Consulting S.p.A. heads the work related to “Exploitation and Market Deployment”, which is designed to find the best way to exploit the project results and bring them into the market. In this sense, EXPLOITATION can be seen as the way of creating value from the project and how partners can benefit from the results. This can involve using outcomes in further research activities other than those covered by the action concerned, or developing, creating and marketing a product or process, or providing a service, or standardizing activities. A Project Result is defined as any tangible or intangible output of action, such as data, knowledge and information whatever their form or nature, whether or not they can be protected .
During the exploitation path, RINA identifies among the several Project Results the most promising ones, labelling them as Key Exploitable Results (KERs). Generally, they can be a product, a service, a software, a database, a design etc. Independent of the format, the result comes from the activities of the project and can belong to one or several partners, in general to all those who actively participated in its development. The Exploitation Activity can then be seen as a strategy how to make the best use of the Project Results towards a commercial approach and potential marketing. Within the RethinkAction project, the exploitation methodology proposed follows a systematic approach, as summarised in the following picture:
Once KERs are identified, they are described and characterised from a marketability point of view, identifying their Technology Readiness Level (TRL), novelty, value proposition, customer profile, target market and competitors. To develop a common vision and agreement about the project results among the consortium, as well as to secure the project research, innovations and discoveries, different Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) management strategies will be analysed and used. This way, partners will be free to benefit from their complementarities and will be able to fully exploit their market position. This will also include the development of a BFMULO Matrix, which aims to assess each partner’s interest and involvement in the linked KER, giving information on Partners interests and claims on:
- B = IPR’s Background (beforehand the project)
- F = IPR’s on Foreground (after the project)
- M = Making the products
- U = Using the result
- L = Licensing the result
- O = Other
Finally, a comprehensive list of risks towards the commercialization and exploitation of the main KERs will be analysed through a Risk Assessment matrix and the final exploitation roadmap will be proposed.
Until now, RINA has identified and characterized different KERs through a number of workshops in which all partners discussed the nature and characteristics of each KERs. Among them is the RethinkAction Platform, which guides stakeholders and citizens in the climate adaptation and mitigation decision-making process by proposing practical land-use based solutions, while at the same time aiming to increase awareness and attractiveness of new lifestyles and behavioral change, and how, in the long term, barriers can be overcome.