PREVIOUS CHAPTER

BACK TO CONTENT

NEXT CHAPTER

THE EUROPEAN MOBILE & MOBILE INDUSTRIES ALLIANCE

INTRODUCTION

   Smartphones and tablet computers are now ubiquitous; they can be seen in use in the metro, at conferences, in schools and all public places. Any technology or social trend in the last five years is closely linked to the advances in mobile availability. Today, Europe has still to find its role in this fast paced business and rapidly developing market. The battle of hardware and standards was once the European success story led by brand names such as (Tele-) Nokia and Siemens, but it seems that the story is now down to Europe’s role as merely holding the standards in international mobile communications. GSM, 3G and 4G are all held by ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) in Sophia Antipolis, France. ETSI was founded back in 1996 by an initiative of the European Commission. The real business based on these standards and the new jobs in this industry seem to be made somewhere else in the world, not by European companies.

A EUROPEAN ACTION TO REVERSE THE TRENDS

  Especially in times of economic crisis, investments in maintaining existing infrastructures or manufacturing structures are favoured over budget-intensive new structural investments. Regions and municipalities in Europe own or co-own, and manage well-functioning and up-to-date mobility infrastructures such as harbours, airports, roads or public transport entities. Customer-oriented and mobile services on top of these infrastructures are in line with the European Commission’s strategies and the coming implementation programmes. The European Mobile & Mobility Industries Alliance (EMMIA) follows the innovation policy framework set by the European Commission’s Innovation Union flagship. It is a strategic initiative bringing together policy makers and industry representatives as announced in ”An Integrated Industrial Policy for the Globalisation Era”. The accuracy, reliability
and variety of location-based services, which are a focus for EMMIA, will be improved by Galileo and EGNOS, Europe’s own Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS). These are Europe’s biggest joint technology projects; Galileo is currently in the deployment stage, and EGNOS is already in operation and certified.

EMMIA 1: Galileo / EGNOS and the mobile internet

  To fully unlock the potential of the mobile and mobility industries requires new policy approaches. Therefore, the European Commission’s Directorate- General for Enterprise and Industry established the “European Mobile & Mobility Industries Alliance” in December 2011 following a call for proposal. The first wave of contracts, EMMIA 1, are all cross-sectoral policy initiatives, combining policy learning with additional concrete actions on better access to finance and on large-scale demonstrators in support of sustainable tourism in rural areas. Two of the concrete actions within EMMIA 1 target the “mobile” entrepreneurs’ need for access to finance. MOBICAP and EMMINVEST seek new concepts to set up seed funds to increase investor readiness through training measures or to convince public fund holders to co-invest for example structural funds in this new emerging industry. Three tourism-oriented large-scale demonstrators (L-SDs) offer mobile services to the modern tourist - through smartphones or tablets. Some L-SDs such as GROW MOBILE focus on city tours. CULTWAyS provides information on cultural routes, examples of which include the Way of St. James or the Via Claudia Augusta. The LIMES initiative covers the German and Bulgarian parts of the Roman Limes, a historic defence line. Virtual reality schemes, hotel booking and weather services, eco-tourism, safety schemes or cultural information are just a few of the services the tourist can enjoy through these services.

  Just as important as these concrete services are the policies that can be extracted, the economic or political barriers found or the standards that are missing; each of which have been taken up, and integrated into the work of the PLP. It is an open platform that brings together policy-makers and business support practitioners, which in the case of EMMIA 1, come from 31 partner organisations across 14 countries and from four European organisations.

  The overall aim of EMMIA is to shape a community in Europe that actively supports mobile and mobility industries as a driver for competitiveness, job creation and structural change by developing and testing tomorrow’s policies and tools for mobile and mobility industries. The objective of the Alliance is to raise additional public and private funding in support of mobile and mobility
industries, through for example, better use of Structural Funds and by co-ordinating current and planned mobile and mobility initiatives. It will promote a more effective use of mobile technologies, applications and services throughout the economy. In addition, it will promote the emergence of new industries that combine modern technologies, including those based on the European GNSS with innovative services. Thereby, the Alliance will contribute to the modernisation of the European economy in general, and to the implementation of the Europe 2020 Strategy in particular. Find out more about the European Mobile & Mobility Industries Alliance here .  

  The term “mobile services” is used for those services focused on mobile and wireless technologies embedded into mobile or fixed IT devices. “Mobile and mobility services” refer to those mobile services that provide solutions directly or indirectly that support the mobility of goods, machinery, livestock and persons. Such services might be designed to give direct support for mobility, such as transport and logistics services, or to provide indirect support via services connected to the needs arising from the location of goods, machinery, livestock and persons. Similar to the information technology industry, mobility is both an industry with unique products and services in itself, and an enabler of other industries through new technologies and services.

EMMIA 2 and 3: Boosting new services based on Copernicus and GNSS

  The second and third wave of calls (EMMIA 2 and EMMIA 3) added more large-scale demonstrator service initiatives to promote both Galileo/EGNOS and Copernicus (the European Earth Observation programme that combines radar, multi-frequency optical and infrared reflection data for land, water and air monitoring).

  In mid-2013 six new large-scale demonstrators in Copernicus and Galileo downstream services were launched under the “EMMIA 2” initiative of the EU in the framework of the European Competitiveness & Innovation Framework Program (CIP). These L-SDs address specific challenges and facilitate the emergence of new industries by implementing innovative services on a local
and national level, each funded with about € 0.5m. SeamlessCities is about intermodal mobility services and develops a mobility service App (which includes multimodal routing and booking), that provides seamless real-time indoor and outdoor navigation and environmental information. It will include Earth Observation (EO) and environmental data from Copernicus in order to demonstrate added value of EO data on mobile devices. myEOrganics uses data from Copernicus and Galileo in the organic food sector. The data are applied in sustainable agriculture to monitor crops in the areas of food security and safety to improve and create efficient certification schemes and lower cost quality controls via satellites. Using the concept of a citizens’ observatory with data provided via the users CITI-SENSE-MOB exhibits the potential for mobile technologies in the environmental health and climate change domain. The demonstrator develops mobile services to support green growth in the Oslo Metropolitan area by providing citizens and authorities with information related to transport and the quality of the environment. Similarly, the other demonstrators Traffic Shaper, Galil-EU and LDA showcase the potential benefits and effectiveness of utilising the European Space infrastructure for a wide range of services that are of benefit to the citizens of Europe.

  In parallel to the demonstrators, the innovation voucher scheme S2G2M2 accelerates the development of innovative services in the Copernicus and Galileo domains. This includes, among others, a training program, the ”mini-MBA” focusing on the challenges start-ups face in launching knowledge-intensive products and services.

  In September 2013 the Copernicus Services Unit of DG Enterprise and Industry published a third round of EMMIA calls, EMMIA 2013. Two contracts, funded by up to € 1.2m, started in summer 2014. Both followed the L-SD concept that demonstrates how innovative, added-value services based on Copernicus and the European GNSS can solve societal challenges or support emerging industries.

 obsAIRveYourBusiness, coordinated in Bavaria, brings in the expertise of the previous obsAIRve consortium on air quality measurements and predictions.

  Its capabilities are now extended to a higher spatial resolution suitable for cities. The measurement results, including one-day forecasts of O3, NO2 and aerosol concentrations are brought right to the citizens’ smartphones based on their location coordinates. The focus is to increase accuracy of the data within cities such as Augsburg and Paris, while disseminating the capabilities through roadshows for interested cities in Europe and beyond.

 The SATURN initiative, led by Aerospace Valley, implements an innovative regional GEO-information platform linked to Copernicus core services data. This creates a favorable eco-system for stimulating entrepreneurship and instigating new mobile and mobility services for citizens. Concrete activities answer the urban mobility challenges of Bordeaux City; they benefit from the experience of Regional Contact Offices across Europe and will take advantage of the key opportunity of the international ITS World Congress 2015 hosted in Bordeaux.

The figure below shows a table of the current EMMIA initiatives as of autumn 2014.

The role and contribution of the EMMIA Policy Learning Platform (PLP)

  The PLP of the European Mobile and Mobility Industries Alliance was set up within EMMIA 1 with the aim of bringing together regional, municipal and national policy makers, to develop “tomorrow’s practice” in support of mobile and mobility industries. The main task of this platform is to steer and further promote EMMIA through the open method of coordination. It analyses, benchmarks and engages in mutual policy learning in the areas of access to finance, large-scale demonstrators and interoperability. In addition, it links with other sectors like space applications and creative arts.

  To this end, the Alliance prepares policy recommendations and elaborates concrete master plans and implementation roadmaps. These will form the basis for a full roll-out of large-scale actions through regional, national and European programmes in support of mobile and mobility industries. The aim is to facilitate the development of new mobile services capable of reinforcing the growth and job creation potential of Europe’s regions and cities.

  The overall mandate of the Policy Learning Platform is to engage in strategic discussions on policies in support of mobile & mobility industries. It produces reports to the European Commission presenting a strategy for policy action to support mobile and mobility industries in Europe.

The Policy Learning Platform (PLP)

• Establishes a policy dialogue and peer review to leverage existing policy measures, such as from Structural Funds and other European programmes, in order to design better policies to support mobile and mobility industries, and to facilitate the emergence of new industries based on mobile services.
• Designs concrete master plans and roadmaps for future actions on the basis of the monitoring and validation of the results of the concrete actions of the Alliance
• Develops joint activities and transnational cooperation at policy level
• Facilitates collaboration with other stakeholders and initiatives at regional, national and European level
• Promotes the activities and results of EMMIA as a whole, including through the maintenance of its public web portal
• Informs SMEs about existing and new support measures for mobile and mobility industries enterprises

Composition of the Policy Learning Platform (PLP)

   To achieve its objectives, the PLP needs partners with a strong commitment towards mobile & mobility industries. The ambition is to involve Europe’s most committed regional, metropolitan and, when it comes to small countries, national policy makers in this initiative. These policy makers are those that support or want to support mobile and mobility industries as a matter of strategic choice, expertise, tradition or priority. The PLP must seek to gain active support from the highest level of the most experienced and committed “movers and shakers” in this field; at the same time it will show its openness towards a wider stakeholder community. To this end, the Platform is composed of 17 regions/cities representing a mix of national and/or regional authorities or organisations supporting mobile & mobility industries as well as up to two sectoral or sub-sectoral European associations in the field of mobile & mobility industries. Six founding regions, Bavaria, Alpes-Maritimes, Oresund, East-Midlands, the Czech Republic, and the Province of Rome – the EMMIA PLP consortium – have been selected through a call for proposals to establish and co-ordinate the PLP. The lead partners (coordinators) of the concrete actions plus representatives of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) are also members.

   In order to draw upon a wider stakeholder community and build upon the best regional, national and European expertise and knowledge across Europe, the remaining members of the PLP were selected among policy-makers and organisations in agreement with the Commission services. This was through an open call for the expression of interest for members published on the Alliance’s and other relevant websites. The task of establishing the PLP was assigned to the EMMIA PLP consortium led by bavAIRia e.V., Oberpfaffenhofen, which organises the process of setting up the Policy Leaning Platform in agreement with the Commission services.

  The members of the platform give the Alliance a public face, represents it at important relevant events, and proactively launches political debates towards the implementation of its recommendations with a view to achieving a high leverage effect. The platform elected a formal representative of the PLP, who represents the platform externally and ensures the visibility of the political debate at the policy level. The EMMIA PLP is chaired by Karin Drda-Kühn, media K, Bad Mergentheim, D.

  The current 17 regional EMMIA members are shown on the map below, in addition to the three new EMMIA PLP Innovation partnership regions of Kyustentil, BG; Cork/Dublin, Ireland and Luxembourg.

EMMIA PLP member regions

   It is expected that further external expertise will be involved in the specific activities of the PLP and that consultation of relevant stakeholders on the proposed recommendations and the roadmaps for policy actions will be launched. Representatives from the European Commission, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the European GNSS Agency (GSA) also attend meetings and contribute to the discussions.Consequently, the specific activities shall not be viewed as close groups but as open fora for discussion.

   Its six founding members were responsible for the planning and organisation of six meetings of the PLP, taking place between June 2012 and November 2014. The agenda of the meetings agreed between the Commission services, the chairperson of the PLP and the coordinator bavAIRia e.V. in Oberpfaffenhofen. The consortium prepares the agenda, ensures high-level input, invites and informs the members about the specificities of meetings. It is also their role to provide secretarial, coordination and support services to the PLP, including the organisation and moderation of the meetings; launching relevant mini-studies, producing proceedings and reports documenting discussions and outcomes for publication on the Alliance’s website. The working language of the PLP is English.

EMMIA PLP Innovation Partnerships

  At the 4th Meeting of the EMMIA PLP in Brussels at the end of 2013 there was a call published for Expression of Interest for regions to undergo a close temporal partnership with the PLP. In March and April 2014 an expert committee evaluated the submissions and recommended to start negotiations with three regions to undergo such a relationship:

- Kyustendil, Bulgaria
- Cork/Dublin, Ireland and
- Luxembourg.

   Each of the three regions committed itself to host two expert workshops as well as a voluntary public event on the support of mobile services and industries in their region. In return, the EMMIA PLP provides expertise, coaching and consulting services to the local authorities through site visits and by supporting the public events offered. The first series of workshops started out in April 2014. During the first round of visits key stakeholders of each region were invited to a one-day workshop, and an inventory of existing support measures and initiatives was created.

   A second round of workshops was held in each of the three regions during May to July. They discussed the feedback from the findings of the PLP over one and a half days by up to twenty experts and coordinators of local initiatives.

   The final round of public events between September and November 2014 discussed the suggested policies and initiatives in combination with the region’s own strategies. These events were held in public and attracted a wide audience of stakeholders.

   The PLP will offer this consultancy service for regions in the support of mobile service industries, beyond the runtime of the EU funding. For concrete offers and regular updates, please visit: www.mobilise-europe.eu

   The EMMIA PLP is an exchange platform, which fosters interaction between the various EMMIA initiatives and channels the feedback to the regions and to the European Commission’s Directorate General for Enterprise and Industry as the initiator. Currently, the Platform unites seventeen European regions, plus the coordinators of the EMMIA large-scale demonstrator and finance initiatives, plus representatives from agencies such as ESA and the GSA. ETSI has separate contracts with the European Commission and accompanies selected large-scale demonstrators in the tourism service industry in order to direct trans-national activities in the direction of potential pre-standards in this industry.

   The PLP’s activities are to give and gather policy recommendations in the support of mobile services for regions in Europe. This is done in close collaboration with its regional members which help to gather best practice in the support of mobile services, help to validate and discuss the findings and support techniques for its practical implementation.

   This EMMIA Guide for policies in the support of mobile services in Europe gathers the set of experiences of five carefully chosen “model regions”. They are: Barcelona, Berlin, Estonia, London and Oresund; with each taking a very different approach in giving active support to their mobile services entrepreneurs.

   The support of mobile services is a challenge for Europe’s regions as it is probable that the successful policies of today will be of no use for tomorrow. Measures to support this fast paced industry and its members that may be decided today in a city council, often come too late, are implemented too slowly and require long-winded applications for support. Mobile entrepreneurs will move to another city and not wait for measures rather than risk their business in such an environment. So, listen to your “mobile” entrepreneurs carefully and respond to their needs, the alternative is to lose them.

PREVIOUS CHAPTER

BACK TO CONTENT

NEXT CHAPTER