‘Futures By Design’ – integrating data science into horticultural SMEs to improve productivity

Futures By Design (FBD) is an EU Interreg North Sea Region funded project created to help SMEs in rural areas of the North Sea region use data analysis to innovate, grow and increase their productivity. The project includes partners in UK, Belgium, Netherlands, Sweden and Germany and aims to grow SMEs' capacity for success which is limited by insufficient access to data and their inability to analyze data to drive innovation and obtain improved results (identified by the World Telecommunication Development Conference 2017 and the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference 2018). The UK part of the project is centered around the Cambridge and Peterborough region, a major center for horticultural production in the UK. Data Driven Innovations, in SMEs, critically depend on the SME's drivers and internal characteristics encouraging SMEs to adopt and adapt digital innovations. These include Absorptive Capacity, Digital Connectivity and Digital Exclusions. This paper presents how these come about, their impact on SMEs and solutions to the barriers to digital solutions. FBD is developing tools to support SMEs in our regions. The purpose is to help participating SMEs with their next step to become more data driven and to provide the building blocks toward the formation of localized Soft Digital Network Infrastructures. The set of developed tools helps outline the current status of digital awareness, discovering the lack of core digital skills and competencies, identifying needs, define the problem statement and explore the possibilities for digital innovation. Every dedicated tool has its own added value and is helpful in a different stage of data-driven working for SMEs, starting from the assessment of an organization's level of data maturity before the start a dedicated project. We report the recommended sequencing in which the tools being developed can best be used to create the most value, representing a possible path to digital awareness for Horticultural SMEs.