As the technical developments in the DIGICOR project are approaching towards delivering preliminary prototypes, the project organised a 1 full-day workshop to discuss business models for the envisioned platform. The workshop was hosted by University of Manchester and attended by all project partners. The DIGICOR platform is slightly different to other centralised platforms. The modular architecture of the DIGICOR platform allows localised instances to enable and support collaborations in different domains e.g. automotive, aerospace.

By enabling secure exchange of data and the enhanced transparency across the collaborative networks, DIGICOR platform offers huge opportunities for collaborative enterprises in different domains. However, the collaborative platform development also raise commercial and legal challenges, e.g. on profitability, investments, data protection, IPR, trade secrets, trust and liability. When collaborative developments are commercialised and/or reused without a sound agreement between all stakeholders, the business modelling of the platform becomes a challenging task.

Therefore, in the DGICOR project it is not sufficient to ensure the delivery of innovative technological solutions, for industrial exploitation of DIGICOR outcomes the ultimate goal is to identify a successful business model and to implement the corresponding organizational and business processes. Thus, the business modelling workshop in Manchester focused specifically on the identification of DIGICOR value-propositions, the IPR agreements of project partners (with clarity on the background and foreground of project outcomes) and finally, the agreements on the viable business models for different use-cases.

The outcome of the workshop was (a) the identification of a set of tools and services that make up the value-proposition of the DIGICOR project, (b) preliminary agreements on the IPR of those value propositions, and (c) two business canvases representing plausible business models for the two use-cases, concerning localised DIGICOR instances for the aerospace and automotive domains.

Further details of the business models will be made available as they become more mature based on on-going partner discussions and consultations with relevant experts e.g. legal and regulatory experts.