The Context

The Future Internet will be an essential part of Europe’s future ICT infrastructure, and will serve as a fundamental instrument to foster international markets and achieve the goals of the Lisbon agenda so as to ensure growth, productivity and employment in Europe. One of the main building blocks of the Future Internet is the ‘Internet of Services’, together with the underlying networked infrastructures such as Software as a Service.

The Concept

The SEQUOIA support action will measure the potential impact of already funded projects by developing a sound socio-economic methodology for the measurement of this impact.

SEQUOIA will emphasise the self-assessment, rather than the evaluation, of research projects in the area of Software as a Service and Internet of Services (SaaS and IoS). SEQUOIA aims to support research projects in maximising their socio-economic impact through the application of a self-assessment methodology that the projects will be able to adopt and apply on their own.

The Approach

While the principal aim of SEQUOIA is to maximise the impact of SaaS and IoS research projects, and also support the transfer of results to SMEs, to reach this objective the SEQUOIA partners deemed it important to firstly measure the potential impact of already funded projects. This will be done by developing a sound socio-economic methodology for the measurement of this impact.

Secondly, it is deemed necessary for the methodology to be applicable by new projects on their own, without the help of this support action. The methodology will therefore be applied accordingly to 25 projects launched under Call 1 (of the FP7 ICT Programme). Having been optimised, the methodology will then be communicated to the projects that will be funded in Call 5 (of the same Programme).

In this way, the new projects will be able to self-evaluate their potential output in terms of socio-economic benefits, and possibly re-orient their activities in order to improve such impact.

Whereas the NESSI platform has in principle addressed in a comprehensive way the essential aspects of technological interoperability and architectural harmonisation for the SaaS domain, and is well-placed to do the same for the emerging Internet of Service (IoS), Internet of Things (IoT) and Internet of Content (IoC) areas of the Future Internet, many practical obstacles remain.

The clearest challenge is how to transition from the collaborative context of EU projects to the competitive context of the marketplace. Market institutions by themselves struggle to provide adequate support for the large variety of private players and economic agents as they leave the shelter of public funding, especially in the context of the growing importance of the Knowledge Economy in the Future Internet.

It is in this context that 25 projects will be studied by SEQUOIA, namely 24 IPs/STREPs, and 1 Network of Excellence. In addition, 3 Support Actions have been funded under Call 1 of the FP7 ICT Programme.

When SEQUOIA starts, these projects will have completed their second year of activity, so that this support action, with the help of the European Commission, will be able to support them when they will enter their maturity phase where their results will first be made available.