The world is changing…

By Adamantios Koumpis September 5, 2022

The world is changing…

… and startups are considered as agents of change.

Young people now, as well as less young ones, quit their jobs ‘en masse’ and find substance and what each of us may understand in our own, individual ways as ‘meaning in life’ – this is what became to get known as the Great Resignation or the Big Quit.

Many of us have been praised within conservative education and life cultures, feeling that taking risks is worth once you have a big organisation to support you. Many of us think like this, and many of us act like this – this is what finally contributes to make change not easy to accept and promote a culture that does the opposite: hinder change.

Our market analysis and development work gave us two figures that relate to our two target markets, namely the NIS sector market and the market of Local Public Administrations:

  • There are over one million European companies operating in the critical and important sectors defined by the NIS/NIS2 directive, and
  • According to Eurostat there are around 96.000 European LPAs.

These figures are not what one might see as a niche market at all. They are extremely big numbers that justify the fostering of several innovation ecosystems that will have a trans-disciplinary and trans-regional character. Let’s see for instance the case we consider in the CS-AWARE NEXT project where two independent pilot studies will be conducted in Italy and Greece for the health care and the water and waste water management. There are lots of critical dependencies there. Only for the health sector, the recent (and still ongoing) COVID crisis revealed some of the major vulnerabilities of the European Healthcare system and in particular in areas where the digitalisation could or should be a game changer.

Especially for the area of healthcare, one should consider that innovative investments in security of health data across borders, including cyber security, is not part of a wish list but of a must-have list. Investments related to use of digital tools that facilitate prevention or enable feedback and interaction with the healthcare providers are a sine-qua-non, same as other investments that provide solutions to interoperability issues.

The implications of all the above is that innovative technologies need to be deployed and sufficiently tested and validated before being adopted by companies and public administrations, in ways that shall genuinely improve businesses confidence, local competences and the means to organically grow. This is what we do within the CS-AWARE NEXT project by means of organising dedicated workshop sessions and all the necessary follow-ups where we gather requirements (: pains, gains, concerns and potential incentives) that do not only consider the technical, but also the organisational, social, political and other aspects related to ensuring improved information sharing and threat intelligence in this context.

When we were designing the project, we haven’t been aware that what we were building as a consortium in terms of complimentarity of competences and expertise was exactly what lies at the core of the Quadruple Helix Model: a great part of our work concerns the support to the public sector to innovate in service delivery by helping change the mindset of decision makers and professionals, and encourage and empower them to implement new cyber security strategies and innovate with cyber security solutions, while also enhance the quality of the cooperation between SMEs, research and academic institutions, as well as public administration and the end-users.

Adamantios Koumpis