BioExcel Deliverable 5.2 - Revised Business Plan

This document is a revised business plan, based upon the previous deliverable that was submitted 6 months ago. It presents the current stage of findings and has to be viewed as intermediate step towards the final Governance and Business Plan that will be due 18 months from now.

The progress that BioExcel has made during the last six months has resulted in a refinement of our strategic development goals.

The vision and mission statements have undergone slight adjustments to emphasize BioExcel’s focus on biomolecular simulations and modelling, and to highlight the desired impact of enabling better science.

While the previous deliverable D5.1 contained a more general description of the HPC ecosystem, we have focused our attention in this revised business plan on our anticipated user base.

The value proposition and the description of our support & service offerings have been refined. We acknowledge that we need to focus on where to generate value, and how we are going to do that, in order to match our ambitions with the available workforce during this initiation phase.

The section on financing has been adapted to reflect our change from the initially discussed membership-fee model towards a service-fee based model. Membership fees would have introduced exclusivity to our service offerings, which would have reduced the desired impact on the largely non-profit user base, and would have forced us to provide a parallel offering of basic (free) and premium grade services. The herein presented service-fee based model has a higher likelihood to be able of generating broad value to the biomolecular research community, while still providing us with the opportunity to collaborate with paying users and industry on single standing
projects.

The material in this deliverable is complementary to two other deliverables submitted at project month 18, as follows:

"D3.2 - Consultancy proposals" describes in what other projects the partners are involved. We argue that there are multiple funding streams for separate activities done by the partners, but in order to ensure a European leadership in the field, there is a crucial need for funding for coherent joint efforts.

"D3.3 - Consultancy Modalities and Funding Options" describes what services and in what ways (i.e. modalities) they can be offered by the center. We give examples of existing services provided by institutions at the partner countries.

This deliverable "D5.2 - Revised Business Plan" describes how those services will be financed and what legal structure will be able to support those offerings.