Ontotext is excited to begin working on the new Horizon 2020 project “Data-driven tools for supporting and improving the decision-making processes of investors for financing innovative SMEs” (InnoRate for short), which will continue from January 2019 to December 2022.
The goal of the project is to disrupt the largely risk-averse financial sector of Europe and in this way to enhance the innovation capacity of high-growth technology sectors and SMEs. This will pave the way for large-scale innovations to flourish in Europe, which will allow it to take place at the forefront of the global innovation race.
InnoRate will deploy a trusted, objective and recognized service platform across the EU and Associated Countries. The novel InnoRate Technology Rating Platform will improve the decision-making processes of investors and lenders for vetting, prioritizing and allowing access to finance to innovative SMEs with high growth potential. The digital decision support tools and services provided through the InnoRate platform will be based on new methodologies for assessment and rating of innovations. These methodologies go beyond the traditional credit-focused approaches in evaluating the technological and business potential, and risks of innovations.
To develop these novel methodologies, the project will adapt the leading Korea Technology Rating System (KTRS) to the European context, which is controlled by different regulations and applies different indicators to measure innovation. KTRS has been used in Korea for more than 20 years and has aided numerous SMEs to access finance and grow.
The InnoRate project coordinator is Q-PLAN International Advisors (Greece). Besides Sirma AI and Q-PLAN, there are 7 partners in the consortium – Ernst & Young Financial Business Advisors (Italy), UniSMART Padova Enterprise (Italy), European Business and Innovation Centre Network (Belgium), White Research (Belgium), Tech Tour Global (Bulgaria), Jolt Capital (France) and Korea Technology Finance Corporation (KOTEC) (the Republic of Korea). Sirma AI is the only technological partner in the consortium, contributing with a unique combination of text analytics, content enrichment, search and an enterprise-grade graph database engine (GraphDB™).
Based on this expertise, Sirma AI will lead the work on designing, developing and fine-tuning the InnoRate Technology Rating Platform as well as on semantic data modeling, ingestion and integration. The company will have an important role in creating an inventory of existing relevant datasets and selecting appropriate visualization methods and tools. Sirma AI will also actively participate in the iterative testing of the InnoRate’s methodologies, tools and services.
The InnoRate Technology Rating Platform and its decision support tools and services will be piloted in a diverse set of use cases – from investors investigating and prioritizing high-growth potential SMEs for access to finance, to financial institutions assessing such SMEs for loan-based financing.
InnoRate has started with a kick-off meeting in Thessaloniki where the consortium partners were introduced and the project work packages were outlined. There was a 1-day workshop where KOTEC presented in detail the assessment methodology for ranking technology innovations and Sirma AI presented the concept of knowledge graphs and the methods for linking different datasets, which will be applied in the project. The agenda also included detailed planning for the first six months of project activities and project management.
With the kick-off meeting, the project has made the first step towards its ambitious goal – to bring innovation to finance and finance to innovation in Europe.
For more information about InnoRate, visit the official website or the Facebook page.
For more information, contact Doug Kimball, Chief Marketing Officer at Ontotext