: Lessons from entrepreneurial projects

International audienceOne of the major challenges confronted by those in charge of technological innovation involves anticipating the value creation model sufficiently early on,in a highly uncertain context both as far as the technology itself is concerned and the potential market. Today, in many industrial sectors, the innovation boundaries have moved towards projects that are more and more exploratory and fuzzy. The simple optimisation of linear processes of the "stage-gate" type is no longer sufficient to build sustainable competitive advantages. The notion of Business Models, when applied to innovation, enables us to describe how a company creates value through innovation, generally within a business ecosystem, and how the value will be distributed between the actors involved. The authors of this book believe that the notions of Business Modelling and value creation are key to all the dimensions of successful innovation, whether technology, marketing, organisational or economically based. Rethinking Business Models for Innovation: this title describes the relationship between thinking, modelling, and also field-testing. The book is based on a series of nine recent cases of innovation involving company managers, often assisted by researchers (the co-authors of each chapter), and how they built and formalised their Business Models and then tested their strategies. After having discovered the variety of the cases, the reader will understand that every innovation situation generates specific questions about Business Models. However, we feel that we can identify three key issues that arise, more or less, in each of these projects. The chapters in this book build on these issues: the identification of sources of value and revenue models (the notion of value creation), the position of the company in the value-network or ecosystem (the sharing of value) and finally the evolution of Business MoDdels over time (the sustainability and the competitiveness of the company). The last chapter goes over all the contributions, exploring the notion of value in the Business Model approach.L'innovation technologique, qu'elle soit conduite par des start-ups ou par de grandes entreprises, n'est plus une condition suffisante de la création de valeur. Créer de la valeur sur des marchés nouveaux nécessite le plus souvent de repenser l'organisation de l'entreprise, sa façon de faire des affaires, ses partenariats stratégiques, autrement dit, son business model. Cet ouvrage se veut un guide pour les porteurs de projets d'innovation en leur fournissant des outils de compréhension et d'analyse de la dimension stratégique de leur projet. Les études de cas présentées sont le fruit d'une collaboration étroite entre les porteurs de chacun des projets et des chercheurs en management de l'innovation reconnus. Au travers de ces cas, trois grandes problématiques sont abordées : l'identification des sources de valeur chez les clients potentiels, la position que l'entreprise pourra prendre dans son écosystème et enfin l'évolution des business models dans le temps. Sur chacun des cas, le lecteur aura accès à une compréhension fine des problèmes stratégiques posés par l'innovation ainsi que des outils de management mis en œuvre pour aider à réfléchir et à agir. (http://www.rethinkingbusinessmodel.net/

A Hybrid In Situ Approach for Cost Efficient Image Database Generation

The visualization of results while the simulation is running is increasingly common in extreme scale computing environments. We present a novel approach for in situ generation of image databases to achieve cost savings on supercomputers. Our approach, a hybrid between traditional inline and in transit techniques, dynamically distributes visualization tasks between simulation nodes and visualization nodes, using probing as a basis to estimate rendering cost. Our hybrid design differs from previous works in that it creates opportunities to minimize idle time from four fundamental types of inefficiency: variability, limited scalability, overhead, and rightsizing. We demonstrate our results by comparing our method against both inline and in transit methods for a variety of configurations, including two simulation codes and a scaling study that goes above 19K cores. Our findings show that our approach is superior in many configurations. As in situ visualization becomes increasingly ubiquitous, we believe our technique could lead to significant amounts of reclaimed cycles on supercomputers.</p

SmartSantander: IoT experimentation over a smart city testbed

This paper describes the deployment and experimentation architecture of the Internet of Things experimentation facility being deployed at Santander city. The facility is implemented within the SmartSantander project, one of the projects of the Future Internet Research and Experimentation initiative of the European Commission and represents a unique in the world city-scale experimental research facility. Additionally, this facility supports typical applications and services of a smart city. Tangible results are expected to influence the definition and specification of Future Internet architecture design from viewpoints of Internet of Things and Internet of Services. The facility comprises a large number of Internet of Things devices deployed in several urban scenarios which will be federated into a single testbed. In this paper the deployment being carried out at the main location, namely Santander city, is described. Besides presenting the current deployment, in this article the main insights in terms of the architectural design of a large-scale IoT testbed are presented as well. Furthermore, solutions adopted for implementation of the different components addressing the required testbed functionalities are also sketched out. The IoT experimentation facility described in this paper is conceived to provide a suitable platform for large scale experimentation and evaluation of IoT concepts under real-life conditions.This work is funded by research project SmartSantander, under FP7-ICT-2009-5 of the 7th Framework Programme of the European Community. Authors would like to acknowledge the collaboration with the rest of partners within the consortium leading to the results presented in this paper

A Survey on Facilities for Experimental Internet of Things Research

International audienceThe initial vision of the Internet of Things (IoT) was of a world in which all physical objects are tagged and uniquelly identified by RFID transponders. However, the concept has grown into multiple dimensions, encompassing sensor networks able to provide real-world intelligence and goal-oriented collaboration of distributed smart objects via local networks or global interconnections such as the Internet. Despite significant technological advances, difficulties associated with the evaluation of IoT solutions under realistic conditions, in real world experimental deployments still hamper their maturation and significant roll out. In this article we identify requirements for the next generation of the IoT experimental facilities. While providing a taxonomy, we also survey currently available research testbeds, identify existing gaps and suggest new directions based on experience from recent efforts in this field