InnoRate (Data-driven tools for supporting and improving the decision-making processes of investors for financing innovative SMEs) is a project funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 call “For a better innovation support to SMEs” (INNOSUP-09-2018).
The ambition 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 paves the way for drastical innovations to flourish in Europe and place it at the forefront of the global innovation race. To put it simply, InnoRate aims to bring innovation to finance and finance to innovation.
Project website: http://innorate-project.eu/
Contact: Svetla Boytcheva
Project Overview
Innovation holds the key to jumpstarting the competitiveness of the European economy. It creates jobs and drives sustainable growth against the backdrop of the financial crisis of 2008.
To this end, InnoRate deploys a trusted, objective and recognized service platform across Europe. The platform improves the decision-making processes of investors and lenders for vetting, prioritizing and providing access to finance to innovative SMEs with high growth potential. The tools and services provided through the InnoRate platform are underpinned by new methodologies for assessment and rating of innovations. These methodologies go beyond the backward-looking and costly practices currently employed to evaluate and signal the technological and business potential and risks of market-creating innovations.
InnoRate leverages Semantic Technology, existing data sources and in-depth human expertise to minimize the efforts of investors and lenders in this respect, reducing knowledge asymmetries and ultimately risk premiums paid by innovative project managers.
Ontotext’s Role
Sirma AI, trading as Ontotext, is part of Sirma Group Holding. Ontotext contributes to the InnoRate project with a unique combination of text analytics, content enrichment, search and an enterprise-grade graph database engine (GraphDB™). Our 20+ years of experience in such technologies and solutions is invaluable for transforming the way in which investors leverage data to facilitate as well as improve their decisions.
Ontotext leads the 3rd work package of the project and is responsible for the overall architecture and system design of the InnoRate service platform, the digitization of InnoRate’s Technology Rating System with ICT-enabled tools, the development of the service platform as well as the integration, technical testing and fine-tuning of the platform based on pilot results.
Additionally, we are responsible for the inventorization of available data sources and visualization techniques aiming to create an inventory of existing relevant datasets that can effectively feed the objectives of the project. We also actively participate in the iterative testing of InnoRate’s methodologies, tools and services. Finally, Ontotext defines the semantic data modeling, data ingestion and data integration of the project.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 821518.