BigDataGrapes D9.3 – Dissemination and Awareness Report

BigDataGrapes aims to help European companies in the wine and natural cosmetics industries become more competitive in the international markets. It specifically tries to help companies across the grapevine-powered value chain ride the big data wave, supporting business decisions with real time and cross-stream analysis of very large, diverse and multimodal data sources. The project involves the following types of commercial partners of the European grapevine-powered industries:

• Wine producers, bottlers and distributors that are managing large vineyards and are taking critical decisions that may affect (a) product lines, such as which grape varieties to combine and plant at which location and under which treatment in order to produce a new wine; or (b) production years, such as how to efficiently monitor and predict where careful vineyard management interventions should take place.
• Producers and packagers of food and wine products using grape by-products as ingredients (such as raisins, must, vinegar and grape juice) and that are continuously monitoring the quality of their product and assessing its vulnerability to risk.
• Natural cosmetic companies that have product lines based on grapes and wine that are continuously testing the quality of the grape extracts that they are using as ingredients and the corresponding suppliers.

BigDataGrapes also aims to improve the competitive positioning of companies in the European IT sector that are serving companies and organisations with software applications:

• Software companies developing farm management and precision agriculture systems for companies in the agriculture sector.
• Software companies developing food risk assessment monitoring and prediction systems for companies in the food sector.
• Software companies developing quality control and compliance software for companies in the beauty and cosmetics sector.

Furthermore, BigDataGrapes aspires to establish a framework facilitating the transparent documentation, exploitation and publication of research assets (datasets, software components results and publications), in order to enable their reuse and repurposing from the wider research community. Thus, the vision of BigDataGrapes project is to develop and demonstrate powerful data processing technologies that could initially serve all European companies active in two key industries powered by grapevines: the wine industry and the natural cosmetics one and it could be evolved to a BigDataGrapes entity demonstrator that will be positioned as the European grapevine-powered thematic entity.

WP9 concentrates on the dissemination of the project and its results among the identified target groups by using online and offline dissemination channels and activities. More specifically, WP9 focuses on (a) creating awareness and engaging further the scientific communities that are related to each one of the projects’ pilots: Table and Wine Grapes Pilot (AUA), Wine Making Pilot (INRA), Farm Management Pilot (ABACO & GEOCLEDIAN), and Natural Cosmetics Pilot (Symbeeosis) (b) creating general awareness about BigDataGrapes and the types of innovative services that scientists may use, in other scientific communities and networks (Task 9.2). Moreover, linking BigDataGrapes with international initiatives and networks that are working on open, big and interoperable data for agriculture and nutrition towards contributing to the corresponding standardisation work falls within the scope of WP9 under Task 9.3. Additionally, alignment of the work held in BigDataGrapes with the development and deployment of roadmap, to help positioning BigDataGrapes in the global Data as a Service (DaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) ecosystems, as well as establish a legal entity for its future management and operation is part of Task 9.4.

WP9 has created until M18 an online infrastructure (including project website and social media channels) and a set of print dissemination materials to promote the project (as presented in Annex C). By the end of M18, the project website has been visited by 1551 people (unique visitors) and the social media channels count 204 followers (Twitter), 981 views (SlideShare) and 26 views (YouTube). These numbers are expected to be further increased as soon as additional tangible results will be made available during the second period of the project (M19-M36)

Finally, the project has organized 5 major events with researchers and practitioners of the grapevine sector (see Section 3.1 and Annex A). Moreover, the project has conducted 13 presentations at conferences, workshops, meetups and networking events and was represented at 3 AgTech fairs with a booth or distributing leaflets (see Section 3.2 and Annex B). In total, more than 110.000 stakeholders have been reached and 13 scientific papers (journal papers and conference papers) were submitted for publication or published (see Section 3.3 and Annex B).

This deliverable describes online and offline dissemination channels, as well as activities, which were conducted until M18 of the project. Moreover, it provides an outlook of the dissemination activities that are planned for the next 18 months of the project, namely M19-M36. Furthermore, Key Performance Indicators are described and applied to measure the effectiveness of dissemination until M18 and allow measuring the progress in the next 18 months.

As already mentioned, οne of the main goals of BigDataGrapes, is to achieve impact at serious competition and risk challenges that European companies operating in the agriculture, food and beauty sectors face. The first 18 months of the project show us that in order this to be achieved a revision of the existing dissemination and exploitation strategy is necessary.

After consulting with experts in the field, we are convicted that this revised strategy needs to be based on the principles of an inbound and digital marketing to maximize the competitiveness of companies that choose to use the data BigDataGrapes (Big) Data Platform. This revised strategy will consist of a new pilot (Food Protection), focused primarily on resolving buyers’ challenges, as the existing ones are towards resolving farmers' challenges. As described in Section 5 of this deliverable Agroknow, as the WP leader, is strongly suggesting that we aim for a revised version of the dissemination and exploitation plan (D9.2) in month 24 that will incorporate the outcomes of the following major actions:
1) Agroknow with the support of all partners will outline a digital marketing strategy. The result of this strategy should be a messaging architecture with supporting regional proof points for all external communication, a Social media strategy and a CEO media story-bible creation for generating a powerful, credible, prestigious content that talks about Agroknow and its solutions in order to position Agroknow as a thought leader in relation to technology applications and solutions in the food sector.
2) To act more effectively and target-oriented towards the full implementation of its defined dissemination tasks via all its communication channels, in order to improve the results obtained so far and to achieve the set targets. It is also suggested, to hire help for punctual tasks (e.g.: setting up google ads, injecting structured annotations in the webpage to improve its ranking, etc).