Final Version of NanoCommons Sustainability Plan

Final Version of NanoCommons Sustainability Plan

Project Deliverable by BNN
Project: NanoCommons, Grant Agreement No. 731032 (Topic “INFRAIA-02-2017 – Integrating Activities for Starting Communities”)
Date of publication: 8 January 2021 (First version – D10.4) / 30 June 2022 (Final version – D10.6)
Area: Innovation Support
BNN team involvement: Beatriz Alfaro Serrano, Andreas Falk
DOI:10.5281/zenodo.8279340

The H2020 project NanoCommons was funded as an infrastructure project for a starting community to provide the concepts and foundation on which the community can continue to build solutions and services. NanoCommons infrastructure’s goal was to address the starting community’s data and nanoinformatics needs.

Within NanoCommons, BNN had several roles. First, we were in charge of building the community around the infrastructure, approaching the community to tailor the services offered to their needs. Second, BNN contributed to the creation of the NanoCommons business plan as well as a sustainability plan, to sustain the project outcomes beyond the project runtime.

The Final Version of the NanoCommons Sustainability Plan builds on the previous deliverables D10.4 “First Testing and Evaluation Results of NanoCommons Sustainability Plan” and D10.5 “Second Testing and Evaluation Results on the NanoCommons Sustainability Plan”, proposing the first version of the business model and analysing all project activities related to sustainability during the last period, respectively. Together, these three reports outline the considerations and activities undertaken with the aim of ensuring the sustained existence and utilisation of the NanoCommons project outcomes beyond the project lifetime. A major NanoCommons objective was to achieve a sustainable and open knowledge infrastructure for the whole nanosafety community, and thus a considerable effort was invested in exploring the options and approaches, focussing on those business models consistent with the ethos of openness and accessibility, given the public funding used to develop the services, and the critical importance of access to Environmental Health and Safety (EHS) data globally.

The business plan proposed within D10.4 should establish a NanoCommons Organisation and help it to achieve long-term economic sustainability to maintain the project’s outputs after its EU-funded period. The NanoCommons Organisation was envisaged as a one-stop-shop for nanosafety and nanoinformatics consultancy and knowledge services, where the customers can get what they need. To do so, several actions were performed to structure the project work towards developing a sustainable set of tools and services and a well-organised organisation through which to offer them to the community. Key elements of that organisation are the NanoCommons Knowledge Infrastructure, the NanoCommons Knowledge Base, as well as its Consultancy and Services. The business plan created for the NanoCommons Organisation envisaged it to exist as an independent and possibly even not-for-profit organisation, while the consultancy and service providers behind the organisation have the full potential for commercial exploitation of their services and to decide on their own business model, which might vary from open data and open source to fully closed pay-for-use services. The business plan only covered the core infrastructure, and presented the cost estimates and potential revenues. Additionally, key partners, key activities and key resources were identified, as well as the potential of leveraging best practice from other e-infrastructures and knowledge bases assessed. Similarly, the value propositions, the customer segments and groups (e.g., supra-national organisations addressing nanosafety; industry users; academic users) were structured and channels to address those groups were defined.

At the time of the deliverable, it was concluded that the project consortium had reached the necessary development stage milestone and was on track to become a sustainable infrastructure by the end of the project.

Additionally, in this deliverable, an evaluation of the TAs and Demonstration Cases with respect to their (potential) contributions to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) was performed by looking at the results from the third funding period. For this, and in order to support the partners in the task of identifying which SDGs have been addressed in the different services being offered by the project via the TAs, an internal, interactive webinar on SDGs was organised by BNN.

Figure 1. Representation of the SDGs identified as being addressed in the different NanoCommons TA projects (from the TA applicant and TA provider perspective)

All NanoCommons public deliverables are available  here.