Central europe - with Novitech comments
WIN
Project Leader
Sportello Donna Business innovation center Pavia -Italy
Isa Maggi, Scientific Coordination
Project Title
WIN: Women Innovation Network
I GENERAL INFORMATION
1. Project identification
2. List and description of partners
2.1 Partner list
Italy
1.
2.
BIC, Sportello Donna Pavia, Project Contact Person: Isa Maggi
Deperimento di Ingegneria di Pavia , Project Contact Person: Marco Morandotti
Germany? ringhand@technologiezentrum.de
Ungheria tkallai60@gmail.com
Slovacchia toth_attila@novitech.sk
Repubblica Ceca lkuhr@mchs.cz
Slovenia? info@inkubator.si
2.2 Identification of the partners
2.3 Partners contact informations
II PRESENTATION OF THE PROJECT
1. Short description of the project (500 char)
The main goal of the WIN project is to stablish capabilities for the Diffusion and Application of Innovation and to transfer the
best practices in designing, instituting, and managing a business incubator that addresses the specific needs of female
entrepreneurs. This transfer of best practices will occur from the Business Innovation Centers (BICs) of the Lombardy Region to
partner of other Central Europe regions joining this projects.
2. Origin of the project and partnership experience (1000 char)
The Sportello Donna BIC of Pavia (Lombardy) has built the first business incubator for female entrepreneurs in Europe. The
numerous success stories of the Sportello Donna BIC and the experience that it has accumulated in the past 15 years of activity
represent an asset that can be shared among the project’s partners and can be made accessible online by designing innovative
Web services supporting, developing, and promoting the business ideas of female entrepreneurs.
3. State of the art of the intervention sector in relation to the activities and objectives proposed
4. Project summary
The main goal of the WIN project is to transfer the best practices in designing, instituting, and managing a business incubator
that addresses the specific needs of female entrepreneurs. This transfer of best practices will occur from the Business Innovation
Centers (BICs) of the Lombardy Region to partner BICs of other European Regions joining this projects. In particular, the
Sportello Donna BIC of Pavia (Lombardy) has built the first business incubator for female entrepreneurs in Europe. The
numerous success stories of the Sportello Donna BIC and the experience that it has accumulated in the past 15 years of activity
represent an asset that can be shared among the project’s partners and can be made accessible online by designing innovative
Web services supporting, developing, and promoting the business ideas of female entrepreneurs.
•
To develop a methodology and related business guidelines that can help women understand the potential of their
business ideas, their business attitude, and the main hurdles that they should face prior to starting a new business.
•
To define transferable business models gathered from the experience of leading European BICs.
•
To understand the specific needs of women that wish to start a new business, their common behavioural requirements,
and their specific skills in helping business innovation.
•
To design a diagnostic kit helping women assess their business attitude.
•
To design and implement a number of innovative Web services that will constitute a dynamic knowledge base
supporting female entrepreneurs from the start of their business.
More specifically, from a technical standpoint, the goal is to design, implement, and test innovative reputation-based Web
services for female entrepreneurs. The objective is to design a platform that can support the intelligent navigation of the Web to
scout and integrate the “best” sources of information according to specific individual needs. The platform will also provide a
personalized self-service environment that allows users to build their own view over the information space, tailored to the
context of use (e.g., personal preferences and needs, characteristics of devices and usage), through the integration of selected
information access services.
To understand the idea, let us consider an entrepreneur who is striving in order for her company to build a reputation on the
Web. Building a reputation represents a marketing must via a new, cheap, and potentially effective medium and also a way to
promote a company’s products with potential Internet customers. For this purpose, the entrepreneur will have to monitor the
Web to assess the reputation of her products and of her company as a whole. Based on this assessment, she will have to take
actions towards improving the reputation of her products and company. This raises a number of issues. Typically, a company’s
Web reputation is the cumulative effect of numerous alternative information sources and the assessment of the reputation
involves the integration of different viewpoints, such as opinions posted at different forums and the dynamic monitoring of the
most reliable sources of information on specific subjects. For example, she might identify key people within different forums
and would like to be informed whenever they contribute to the forum with comments on her company or products. To the state
of the art, current technology does not address these needs. The platform that we propose aims at providing an environment
satisfying all these new requirements.
This involves the selection of the “best” sources of information, the assessment of their trustworthiness, and the integration of
the relevant content into an overall assessment of reputation. The concept of reputation is the result of the assessment of
several properties of sources and contributors which have been thoroughly studied in the data quality literature. These
properties include correctness, completeness, timeliness, dependability, and consistency [CSurvey09]. The data quality literature
explains that the aggregation of these measures provides an overall quality assessment that is often referred to as information
“confidence”. The cumulative effect of confidence is the main driver of the actual reputation of an information source.
In addition to discovering the best sources of information, the entrepreneur might also add new value to the identified
dependable sources by combining different trusted services for creating her personalized information access. For example, she
might want to combine the identified forum with a map service showing the location of other competitors mentioned in the
forum, as well as with services for accessing rankings, news, and images. This implies the availability of methods for rapid and
easy service aggregation, which can be based on mashup technologies. Mashups are innovative applications that create new
value out of the services they integrate, in that they combine them in a novel, value-adding manner and thereby provide a
functionality that was not there before [WWW07]. Current approaches provide solutions for the integration of heterogeneous
components, and also easy-to-use composition environments that can be used even by end-users with limited programming
skills. Mashup developers, however, need to retrieve the desired components. The platform that we want to propose will
therefore be able to provide entrepreneurs with recommendations about the “best” components evaluated against the
combination of the quality of data they supply (data reputation) and their suitability with respect to the context of use.
Finally, the entrepreneur will have to take actions towards building an online reputation based on the assessments and
coninuous monitoring of the Web described above. To this aim, the platform will provide semi-automatic services that a)
suggest counter-actions to respond to reputation attacks, such as unfair comments, b) automatically enact some of these
counteractions, such as automatic responses onto multiple information sources specifying violations of terms of use, c) suggest
and possibly enact reputation building actions with sound methodological guidelines.
The design of the platform involves the following challenges:
1)
The selection of high-quality information based on the evaluation of the quality of unstructured and semi-structured
information with data quality techniques.
2)
The ranking of services for accessing data based on the reputation of the data they provide as well as users’ preferences
and needs.
3)
The creation of personalized information spaces through the integration of services by means of easy to use mashups
tools.
4)
The definition of a reputation building methodology leveraging reputation assessment and Web monitoring services.
III GOALS AND ADDED VALUE OF THE PROJECT
1. General and specific objectives of the project, including explanations regarding outputs, results, and foreseen activities
(750 char)
The project will provide the following technical deliverables:
 To develop and maintain the WIN thematic community portal ( so called WIN innovation zone) enabling:
o Presenting and sharing social innovation ideas among the partner organizations of the WIN consortium
o Blog on the role of women in social innovation at workplaces – mainly in SMEs
o Working together in implementing innovation ideas (as continuation of the WIN project)
 Broker to select information sources based on different parameters, coming from DQ, but also generic QoS parameters
(software component)
 Mash up component creation environment, based on the input provided by the broker (software component)
 Demonstrator in a real scenario (health context)
 Short report explaining the methodology
These deliverables will be the output of the first year of research and will be based on existing software components previou sly
developed within the research team:
 Information broker [XXX] that can assess the reputation of structured data sources. The broker will be extended to semistructured and unstructured data sources.
 A consolidated mash up engine that will be extended with a module for component selection and/or creation based on the
input provided by the broker.
Within a one-year time frame, the methodology and the design of the software components will be complete, while their
implementation will be a proof of concept to be extended in subsequent research years. The proof of concept will demonstrate
a) the feasibility of the approach and b) the advantages of a reputation-based selection of mash up components compared to a
component discovery based on simple search functionalities. The proof of concept will take a user perspective and will discuss
results against the practical requirements of typical users in the female entrepreneurship context. These requirements will be
gathered by cooperating with Sportello Donna BIC. The Sportello Donna has launched the first female incubator in Europe, has
experience with…A fundamental concern of the Sportello Donna is that entrepreneurs use the Web correctly to gather
information that can lead to a sound reputation building decisions. Requirements will be gathered directly from entrepreneurs.
The Sportello Donna will help a) information for user profiling, business needs, and typical concerns to define what is means to
access “good information” and what are the actual risks of surfing the web through mere search without a filter, b) the Sportello
Donna may be interested in offering as a free service an online environment that supports the creation of personalized
reputation building environments that leverages the context knowledge developed and owned by the Sportello Donna.
2. Concrete impact of the project in the evolution of territorial policies of the intervention sector (1000 char)
3. Transnational dimension of the project (1000 char)
IV TECHNICAL IMPLEMENTATION OF THE PROJECT
1. Working Plan
Project duration: 34 months
Novitech (Partner 5) activities:
Activity
Timing
Budget(€)
Comment
1.
Customization and redesign of the generic Novitech
thematic portal http://izone.novitech.sk – based on the
WIN collaboration plan
M1-M4
18600
Input: WIN collaboration plan,
2.
Training and hotline for the www.izones/win thematic
portal users
M4-M34
30000
3.
Hosting of the WIN project portal, WIN public portal and
the WIN Blog
M2-M34
6400
4.
Evolutionary functional maintenance of the portals during
the project
M2-M4
20600
Based on the WIN community
requirements
5.
Building the Slovak WIN Chapter ( planning, promotion,
dissemination activities)
M10-M34
25000
€20000 personal cost and €5000
promotional materials
6.
Basic innovation trainings for the Slovak WIN Chapter
members
M10-M12
31000
e-learning content, Webmeeting and 2x
2days x20 person workshops
€8600 Own contribution
M28-M30
3400 own contribution of our
www.teledom.sk conference centre
7.
8.
Moderation of the Slovak WIN Chapter activities
a.
Evaluation of Innovation ideas
b.
Pilot Innovation projects
Participation in the transfer of know-how and in
coordination activities of the project
9.
M10-M34
25000
€10000 own contribution to personal
costs
M10-M34
10000
Cost of project meeting, planning,
evaluations
166600
The Novitech Partner Teledom facility also is hosting the regional Young Business Innovation Centre ( www.izones.eu/bic ),
certified by EBN
V COMMUNICATION AND CAPITALIZATION
1. Summary of capitalization and enhancement strategy of the project results (2000 char)
VI BUDGET OF THE PROJECT
1. Budget of the working plan and the implementation phases of the project