Increasing Innovation

The Iliad DTO will drive innovation by building an infrastructure capable to develop trusted and fit for purpose science-based deliverables (observation system, modelling capacity, and maps) that can be used by industry, government, and civil society to better understand the needs of customers, citizens, communities, and improve the relevant services and products. By integrating assets related to seas and oceans (data, models, physical ocean observatories at sea) with digital technologies (cloud, super high-performance computing capacities, artificial intelligence, and data analytics) into a digital component, the Iliad DTO will offer a consistent high-resolution, multi-dimensional description of the ocean. It will propose a simulator to test scenarios that deal with different evolutions of the ocean environment according to climate scenarios, anthropogenic stressors, or Green Deal policy strategies.

It will empower citizens, governments, and industries to collectively share the responsibility to monitor, preserve and enhance marine and coastal habitats, while supporting also a sustainable blue economy (fishing, aquaculture, transport, renewable energy, etc.). The Iliad DTO will be a disruptive value creation system that will generate numerous innovative solutions for diverse users. It will strengthen SMEs' services and contribute to ensure a highly competitive position in European and international markets, thereby creating and protecting jobs, increasing revenues to allow further investment and technological developments. It will allow civil society to check assertions by public authorities.

Furthermore, the effort required to assemble and process data from different sources and of a different nature is an obstacle to innovation. Once this obstacle is removed, a whole host of new products and services built on multiple sources of data can be developed. It will showcase the "Big Data" thesis, i.e. "analysing large data sets—big data—will become a key basis of competition, underpinning new waves of productivity growth, innovation, and consumer surplus".

The Iliad Marketplace is a key aspect contributing to driving innovation by facilitating access to all developers in the field of ocean related services to the DTO, providing them with vastly more public domain data, synthesised information, services, models, scenarios, simulations, forecasts, and visualisations, as well as connecting practitioners across the world to stimulate both competition and collaboration, ultimately leading to new products and services.