Boosted by the European Space Agency: from idea to MVP (part 1)
It all started with a technology/vision roadmap whitepaper for our B2C outdoor activities marketplace called “WeHike” (a platform intended to connect outdoor enthusiasts allowing them to launch and book social trips from other amateurs or professionals who could propose them). The whitepaper’s goal was setting up a vision based on technologies that could make us stand out from the crowd.
Since I started exploring each Alpine valley back in 2011 after my arrival in Switzerland, I started wondering how, as a Software Engineer, I could bring value to outdoors enthusiasts.
A (really) bad expierence on a tricky hard-snow patch during a spring hike made me ask myself the question “could we potentially detect this before chosing our trail?”. The fields of Earth Observation and Geoinformatics gave me the hints. I drafted a vision where we could detect the conditions over any trail in near real time to make outdoors much safer for anyone.
The search for partners
We knew several programmes in Switzerland which supported industry-academia partnerships on R&D projects, the most well-known one being the CTI Projects (now Innosuisse projects). Such a programme could fit well with our strategy and help us find Switzerland-based leaders in the Earth Observation and Remote Sensing fields.
We started consulting with industry actors who could help us drive this tech vision agenda forwards and could be interested into applying to a funding programme like the one Innosuisse offered. After some initial research, we found out which were the most important entities working on Earth Observation and snow-related topics in the country. However, knocking the right doors can take a little bit more effort than that!
AP-Swiss and ESA’s ARTES20 IAP programme
Our mission of building an Earth-Observation based project was heard by Innovaud, an entity supporting startups on early stages in the Swiss canton of Vaud. They put us in touch with AP-Swiss, which became the key supporting partner towards bringing our vision to reality. AP stands for Ambassador Platform of the European Space Agency’s promotion programmes.
The team at AP-Swiss is formed by highly experienced experts in the field with, most importantly, a vast network to leverage and help you build a strong consortium and overall case for your project, if neccessary. At the time of writting, 9 European countries host a related AP entity, which are eager at supporting their host countrie’s companies and startups at any stage on obtaining ESA support for their innovation project.
In our case, AP-Swiss identified in our vision a strong case for ESA’s ARTES20 IAP programme (ARTES for Advanced Research in Telecommunications System, and IAP for Integrated Applications Promotion).
Via that programme, we could access financial support for a Feasibility Study to help us bring the vision to a preliminary market-ready stage. AP-Swiss directly introduced us to the right potential partners who later became part of the consortium as our subcontractors: University of Zürich, WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research (SLF) and ExoLabs.
The application process
With the goal being to receive a European Space Agency contract, the road was not exempt of a long bureaucratic and paperwork-intense application process. Luckily, we had AP-Swiss to help us navigating through it. It basically consisted on:
- A draft proposal to be preliminary approved by ESA
- A full proposal to be approved by the Swiss Spatial Office, with a focus on the benefits the project would bring for Switzerland and its alignment to the Swiss Space Policy.
- Only after approval by SSO, a full proposal directed to ESA
This process took us more than 6 months to complete. The requirements for such applications are very demanding: in order to pass the threshold, one needs to make a strong value-added proposal accompanied by an excellent financial, organizational and project management framework. No need to say the consortium partners need to be fully aligned with every single aspect of the joint proposal!
The last (and celebrated) step was a negotiation meeting held at ESA ESTEC offices in the Netherlands.
So what’s next?
With an ESA contract in our hands, we were set-up to start working towards our goal of detecting terrain conditions near real time to support the Outdoors Industry.
On part 2, I will speak about how we executed on that contract and the supporting figure of ESA during the execution, which was key in achieving a high-quality result! Meanwhile, feel free to have a look at our ongoing Seedrs Crowdfunding Campaign.
