S10 - Session P3 - ‘Futures by design’ - Integrating data science into horticultural smes to improve productivity

Authors: Marcus Travers *, Emanuele Giovannetti, Magdalena Partac, William Davies

Futures By Design (FBD) is an EU Interreg North Sea Region funded project created to help SMEs in rural areas of the North Sea region to use data analysis to innovate, grow and increase productivity. The project includes partners in UK, Belgium, Netherlands, Sweden and Germany to address the capacity for SME's success as limited by insufficient access to data and the inability to analyse data to drive innovation and obtain improved results (identified by the World Telecommunication Development Conference 2017 and the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference 2018). The UK part of the project is centred around the Cambridge and Peterborough region, a major centre for horticultural production in the UK. Data Driven Innovations, in SMEs, critically depend on the SME's drivers and internal characteristics encouraging SMEs to adopt and adapt digital innovations. These include Absorptive Capacity, Digital Connectivity and Digital Exclusions. How these come about, the impact on SMEs and solutions to the barriers to digital solutions are presented. Futures by Design is developing tools to support SMEs in our regions. The purpose is to help participating SMEs with their next step to become more data driven and to provide the building blocks towards the formation of localised Soft Digital Network Infrastructures. The set of developed tools helps to outline the current status of digital awareness, discovering the lack of core digital skills and competencies, identifying needs, define the problem statement and explore the digital innovation possibilities. Every dedicated tool has its own added value and is helpful in a different stage of data-driven working for SMEs, starting from the assessment of an organisations level of data maturity before the start a dedicated project. We report the recommended sequencing in which the tools being developed can best be used and create the most value, representing a possible path to digital awareness for SMEs.