The hard thing about impact

By Adamantios Koumpis September 13, 2022

The hard thing about impact

It is now over 8 years that the ‘Hard Thing about Hard Things’ has become a best-selling reader on entrepreneurship. The reason that the audience liked the book may be because the author is not afraid to take for granted that mistakes happen and are an inevitable, or as I prefer to call: a ‘shadow capital’ for every enterprise and venture.

Ben Horowitz, the author of the books, is apart from businessman and investor also active as blogger, devoting time and energy to communicate his ideas and also have them tested with a wider audience.

In the CS-AWARE Next project we are facing a dual challenge: we must cope with a very ambitious research agenda, which is something that all partners are aware of and committed to achieve, but we also are expected to perform on creating impact.

This is not at all a second priority – impact is same important as the excellence in our research. If we fail to exploit the knowledge created within the project lifetime, we shall fail to become sustainable.

In the CS-AWARE project, that CS-AWARE-NEXT builds upon, we have built as a legacy of the project the CS-AWARE Corporation that is also set as the main vehicle for exploitation of the project results, and thus the project’s pathways to impact.

Practically this means that we intend to bring the project results to the market in the context of the CS-AWARE cyber security awareness and management platform. To this we have set some ambitious goals to reach – and we have quantified them into KPIs.

Within the project lifetime we shall reach out to 1200 NIS and public sector organisations in 12 European markets and try to engage them in the project developments and our work. We shall also hold at least 15 events and workshops for them and shall issue 6 newsletters which we shall aim to distribute them.

Out of this, our exploitation goal is to come up with 120 new customers for the CS-AWARE-NEXT platform. We shall achieve this with the help of the dissemination partner FocusEurope and our two market development partners: OTS in Greece and CesViter in Italy, that will led the processes for identifying and engaging with relevant organizations. Both OTS and CesViter had been members of the CS-AWARE project and see the business opportunity in the commercial deployment of the project results.

What makes them unique are that we aim to offer a simple to use interface that provides holistic awareness and allows quick reaction times to incidents through continuous monitoring, not to mention that we also provide system self healing from identified mitigation options and superb information sharing for collaboration and legal compliance.

In the project we face an unprecedented opportunity: we need to breed a culture of trust and convince people from our target ‘customer base’ of NIS and public sector organisations to working on cyber security problems instead of covering them. We are determined to seize this opportunity and contribute to the development of secure public data spaces and service infrastructures throughout the European Union.

Adamantios Koumpis