EFEC is leading the UK capitalisation phase of the ‘Futures By Design (FBD) project.
FBD is an EU Interreg Project, devised and led BY Andrew Thomson, EFEC CSO. It worked with over 1000 SMEs in 5 countries over 4 years, helping them to understand more about the ways digitising can help generate cash, cut losses, save time.
Over 200 SMEs went through the ‘Data Jump Start’ and ‘Data Brian Wave’ self-assessment and over half of these then completed a project supported y FBD that lead to growth, innovation or increased productivity.
All of the work we did with SMEs was based on tools mainly devised and used by the Jheronimus Academy of Data Sciences (JADS), part of the University of Tilburg in the Netherlands. JADS has a great record of success in working with SMEs to make digitising work, and they are a key partner of EFEC as we roll out the successor project for UK SMEs.
We will be saying a lot more about FBD, bit to start with it is interesting what we found form the 250+ self-evaluations by the SMEs.
The Data JumpStart compares the outcomes of the 40-part self-assessment with other SNEs and over time JADS has divided the following descriptors:
And the outcomes: nearly all the SMEs we worked with were “EGGS” (data- beginners, very little data science / systems and needing help how to store and use data); or “SQUIRRELS” (gatherers who collect and use data for basic purposes, but it may not be ‘clean’, secure or used to any great extent to help the company). Outcomes mainly eggs and squirrels, unrelated to size / success of companies.
And the idea of course, was to help SMEs move from left to right – the next step of their data entrepreneurship journeys from EGGS to KINGS!