During the recent INSPIRE Conference in Florence, Glenn Vancauwenberghe (KU Leuven) and Piergiorgio Cipriano (EC JRC) presented the first results of the online survey on Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) working on Geomatics and Information Technlogies (GeoICT).
http://www.slideshare.net/smespire/leveraging-smes-strenght-for-inspire
Some key findings:
- almost 90& of GeoICT companies have been founded between 1988 and 2008
- 90% of companies are “small”, with less than 50 employees; “micro” companies (less than 10) represent 60% of all companies
- 75% of companies have an annual turnover of less than 1 million Euro
- Public sector is the main customer for most companies (60%), mainly at local/national level
- 69% of companies are aware of INSPIRE but …
- … only 34% are really directly involved in some INSPIRE related activities
- Data modeling, view services and metadata are the main developments related to INSPIRE, while …
- … data schema transformation is the lowest
- INSPIRE has already had impact on companies, mainly in terms of new products and services
- Barriers to innovation are mainly related to financial issues, and difficulties in entering R&D projects (only 1/3 of companies participated to co-funded R&D projects)
The survey (still available online at http://tinyurl.com/smespiresurvey) has been already completed by 295 companies from more than 16 European countries.
More presentations about the smespire project and from SMEs members of the smespire Network are available on slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/smespire