This online workshop aimed to show how Kaila works and how this tool will facilitate searching among all the information available regarding funding opportunities, as well as the projects and organisations that receive it. Kaila shows how European agents are innovating, with whom they collaborate, on what topics they are working, what funds they obtain and what opportunities for financing exists in the future for each technology or sector. 

The webinar had Ivana Rae ALMORA, Project and Policy Officer at EURADA, as a moderator and Aránzazu ALBÍSTUR (Arantxa for short), innovation consultant of Zabala Innovation Consulting S.A, as the main speaker. 

The workshop began with Ivana welcoming all the participants to the workshop, describing its topic, and introducing Arantxa to all the attendees explaining about her background. After this, Aránzazu started her presentation by sharing her screen with the Kaila power point. She explained to the public about the context of Kaila and its creation. She explained that in Zabala they work to promote innovation to their customers, helping them to develop their innovation ecosystems. They realised, however, that nowadays companies are changing the way they innovate, moving to a new open innovation model involving modeling, which means that they integrate external organisation and professionals, such research centers, universities, suppliers, even competitors. Now it is known that there are enormous talents emerging from companies, especially in this complex and dynamic time of innovation.  

Digital technologies can enable this paradigm shift and Zabala is aware of this. For this reason, they were exploring the opportunities offered by data processes. The outcome of this search thus became the new platform, Kaila. As Aránzazu explained, Kaila was born to contribute to the needs in the innovation processes such finance and accelerate the process of finding new funding opportunities in the European world, analysing projects and, keeping updated on the latest technological issues identifying new innovators in Europe.  

Any type of organisation can find value in using Kaila. Each one, with its own perspective, can convert the information they get from Kaila into valuable information for their organisation. A Kaila user can detect innovators with whom they may be able to create an innovation network or who may contribute to generating competitiveness. The need they can find for managing innovation ecosystems could be attracting innovation, updating of all the funding for regional development programmes, monitoring of regional innovation poles, encouraging interregional cooperation at national and international level, and many others. Through Kaila all these needs can be supported, but Kaila also offers the opportunity to collaborate with collaboration industries and which see companies might be interesting in specific lines of research. 

That is why they launched Kaila, the digital platform to promote open innovation in organisations, helping them to create and manage the innovation ecosystem a European level. The platform is to have three modules: 

• Kaila Analytics, its aim is to allow users to analyse technological trends using the area search, to identify innovation opportunity in programmes, to find disrupting project in Europe already funded, and to identify innovative organisations.  
• Behind Kaila, there are many sources (European databases) that help to save time spent on search and analysis. These also help users in their decision-making processes and giving visual information, reporting information, etc. 

The other two modules, which will be launched this year, are: 

• Kaila Wise: This will offer advance recommendation based on personal experiences, interests, and activities. 

• Kaila Connect: This will allow users to work directly with people of interest at European level.  

Kaila is a consequence of the future of innovation and open innovation models. The organisation wants to dynamise and to help organisations to expand their ecosystem with other organisations.  

In the second section of the webinar, Aránzazu showed all the participants a user experience video from EDF in which we could hear opinions of Kaila. For EDF “Kaila is simple, easy to use and low-cost. Kaila allows us to be more productive”. In the video François-Xavier Testard-Vaillant, a representative to the European Commission at EDF R&D, explained the need they had to access projects that could be considered precursors to which they wanted to respond. He said that Kaila database makes it easy for them to find projects that respond to calls which they are interested in. The objective was simple, giving all the collaborators in the Brussels office, as well as certain projects managers in Paris, a tool that is both simple and efficient and enables the identification of projects that respond to calls like those they were targeting. Before Kaila, consulting databases was often highly tedious, though with Kaila this can be simplified and the consultation of data from CORDIS made more efficient. Regional project databases or the LIFE projects’ database can be easily accessed. For all of this, Kaila is quite interesting because it significantly increases productivity and provides access to people that might not have the courage or the resources to use database like CORDIS.  

After this, Aránzazu began the third section: a practical demo of Kaila. She showed all participants how Kaila works and what Kaila can offer its users. She also demonstrated how to access to the platform and how to start looking for information and getting data. Kaila has different ways to access this, by key words, areas of interests, or organisations.  

If you try by the option area, for example with “big data” area we can see all the information we can access getting many results from this area of interest, the information related to the funding opportunities in relation to the term we want. We also can find the timeline with all the budget and the money invested and in which project they were invested. We have different graphics to see the distribution of the budget, the number of participants in the consortium, who is the leader, and so on. Also, which organisations are interesting in these areas of interests, having the opportunity to see more details. 

In the project section, in relation to big data we can find more information, for example the list of the countries involved. We can also see all the innovators and the spots in a global map in which you can see by colours the info of all the organisation. All this can be done by using different filters to make the search easier. Another advantage is the reports that can be produced; all important information can be downloaded in an Excel spreadsheet in order to work with it for our organisation or objectives. It could be also interesting for searching for SMEs investing in other projects or pieces of research that you might be interested in.  

Another large section of the area would be innovators, you can choose what list of innovators you are looking for, as an example you can filter innovators for big data, kind of organisation, which country you would like to get information about, etc. Kaila also offers an organisation directory, where you can type the organisation you would like to know more about and you can find much information about the organisation related to the projects that this has participated, the collaborators, the information related to the project, the distribution by programme, etc, and we can get the information about the organisation as a word document with all the information related to the organisation itself with all the information related to European Projects. 

Lastly, there was the last section of the webinar: questions and answers. The participants asked some questions and our speaker Arantxa answered all of them. We can find them below:  

1.How are you going to generate the Community? Through Kaila Connect. By providing value through the analysis of all the information. They are really interested in use the platform to get the information to know the interests of other connectors. And they want in the future propose an active platform not just for the platform, but to recommend other innovators, users with the same interests and to connect those interest among everyone in order to dynamise that collaboration to foster the building of the new ecosystem.  

2. We would like to know if Kaila covers all the EU programmes and if not, do you plan to expand the database? For now, they have FP7, H2020, LIFE, CEF, EUROSTARS and they are constantly updating databases, and they plan to regularly add new databases. Horizon Europe will be published, COSME, ERASMUS PLUS, INTERREG, etc. Kaila has data related to the results of the project innovation radar at first instance with the open data sources, but they do not rule out the possibility of connecting with other databases that are not open.  

3. What is the level of completeness of data already uploaded related to various areas? For example, in the case of tourism, are there very limited forthcoming funding opportunities or projects, and many funding opportunities are unknown. Right now, the period is very limited, they can find very few open calls due to the end of the previous MFF. They think that in April they will get a lot of information about calls and new projects.  

4. In terms of the two upcoming modules, how will be the price impacted when the modules are launched? They have not discussed it yet, but the strategy is keeping the price low. Now the price is €29 per month, and they believe it will be kept at around this level, because the main interest is to increase the community. If they increased the price very much, it would mean that the community will decrease. 

5. Would it be possible for regional agencies to have an enterprise subscription through with they could offer access to the platform to a selected number of companies or organisations in the region that are related to smart specialisations? They have three option, larger or packages of licenses and they can module or offer lower prices for the members of the association, they can discuss.  

6. As an association of RDAs, I assume that the largest amount EURADA’s member will be on interregional exchange or cooperation, when will the information of the various Interreg programmes be available on Kaila?  They cannot know the exact date for this, but Zabala is aware that it is a key programme. Probably the first semester of 2021 will be available because it is very interesting.  

7. In terms of the close calls in your database, how far back does the information go? For big data was 2007. So, does that year depend on the topic or the Keyword entered? This is related to the program, they have included in the platform FP7 and H2020, the period of time covered is the period covered by Kaila.  

8. Which function of the platform do you use the most and you find the most unique compared to other, maybe similar services?  They are different users; it depends on the type of organisation. Almost all the users look for funding opportunities. But for example, private organisations and SMEs give more value to the possibility of follow the activity of competitors, or follow potential customers. They work with specific customers so they can see the research activities of the customers or the updates, they can follow the short and long terms strategy of the company, so they can plan their own strategy in order to be in the same way.  

9. What is the growth perspective that you have defined for Kaila? And aside from wise and connect are there new features that you have planned for the future? Yes, they are working in new functionalities that could be uploaded to the platform to fulfil the doubts of the users. They are thinking about making growth in terms of databases, about improving the potential statistics of Kaila analytics, and afterwards they will have 2 more modules soon. Every 15 days they make the platform better more attractive and add more functionalities, filters, and possibilities in different sections. 

10. Where do you get the data presented in the platform? From the European Commission, as CORDIS; databases related to different programmes etc. Arantxa highlighted that this is now, they do not rule out having more databases from other non-open sources. This will depend on the needs they see during the upcoming months.  

The final number of participants was 64 and this interesting workshop was recorded in order to allow people to know more about Kaila. Did you miss the webinar? Don’t worry! You can rewatch the webinar on our Youtube channel. And we also encourage you to try out Kaila platform free of charge for one week by clicking here. 

If you have any question about the Kaila workshop or about this interesting tool, Kaila, please contact our colleague Julia COLOMER.