Building the Future of the STELAR Innovative KLMS Platform
On September 24, an internal workshop led by Tatjana Knezevic, Head of Exploitation at Foodscale Hub, took place as part of the STELAR project. The session was dedicated to laying the groundwork for the commercialisation of the STELAR Knowledge Lake Management System (KLMS), a cutting-edge platform designed to help data-intensive organisations unlock the full value of their data.
The workshop marked a pivotal moment for the project as participants engaged in early-stage discussions on critical aspects such as definition of a profitable business case, creating a compelling value proposition, deciding on an optimal business model that can monetise open-source software, while taking into account relevant IPR considerations.
Understanding the STELAR KLMS: A Value-Driven Platform
At the heart of this workshop was the task of defining the business case and value proposition for the STELAR KLMS. The system is aiming to enable organisations to manage, share, and extract value from vast amounts of data. Given the increasing reliance on data-driven decision-making, the STELAR KLMS offers an innovative solution by providing a collaborative, shared infrastructure for managing large datasets.
The value proposition of the KLMS lies in its efforts to help startups/SMEs, medium professional users (incl. domain experts & data scientists) and enterprises from different parts of the supply chain, who want to manage FAIR and AI-ready data in an automated and energy efficient way by its sets of data management tools.
The tools allow:
- enhancing dataset descriptions by automatically extracting additional metadata, quality indicators, and summaries describing the content of the dataset, thus enabling more fine-grained criteria for data discovery and reuse;
- (semi-)automatically mapping concepts and terms across ontologies and vocabularies, linking data instances across sources, and aligning data in space and time;
- (semi-)automatically labelling different types of data (textual, geospatial, temporal) and generating synthetic data to increase the input for ML models.
This creates opportunities for organisations across various sectors, particularly those facing challenges related to data accessibility, integration, and analysis. The STELAR KLMS will be offered on a commercial framework that encourages open collaboration and shared value creation, making it a versatile and inclusive platform for data management.
Exploring Business Models for the KLMS
One of the primary goals of the workshop was to explore potential business models that could work for the STELAR KLMS. Given the platform’s collaborative nature, participants discussed how different models could enable the system to thrive in the market. Some of the business models discussed included the Freemium Model, Data-as-a-Service (DaaS), the Pay-as-you-go Model, and a Usage-Based Model.
Each model comes with its own set of challenges and opportunities. As the workshop progressed, participants highlighted the importance of aligning the chosen model with the system’s value proposition, ensuring that it supports the long-term sustainability and growth of the platform. Also, it’s been highlighted that different pricing tiers may offer varying levels of access to the platform’s features offering users the ability to choose a plan based on their needs, hence avoiding unnecessary expenses.
Addressing legal aspects and IPR considerations
During the workshop, the topic of Intellectual Property (IP) commercialisation was also discussed, with Tatjana Knezevic providing insights into different strategies that could help bring the STELAR KLMS to market. Tatjana touched on several key strategies, including licensing, franchising, and joint ventures, each offering different pathways for commercialising the KLMS while ensuring its innovations are protected.
These strategies are essential for unlocking the system’s market potential and ensuring that its unique value proposition reaches a broad audience, all while securing future profits and opportunities for business expansion. The fruitful discussion among partners was centred around the possibility of forming a strategic alliance between key actors responsible for development and delivery of STELAR KLMS. Further discussions on this topic will continue as the project progresses.
Crafting a Go-To-Market Strategy for STELAR KLMS
The final area of focus during the workshop was the go-to-market strategy. As the commercialisation process moves forward, this strategy will be essential in determining how the KLMS reaches its target market and begins generating value for users.
As these discussions continue, the team behind the STELAR KLMS is focused on building a solid foundation for its future. This workshop represents the first step in a longer journey towards creating a platform that will not only serve the needs of data-driven organisations but also contribute to the growing ecosystem of smart agriculture and data management solutions.
