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On 18th and 19th April 2013 the third ARTES Applications Workshop was held at the Centre for High Defence Studies (CASD) in Rome.
The workshop was attended by more than 250 attendees and featured projects supported through ESA.s Integrated Applications and SatCom Applications programmes. The event was attended among others by Filippo Milone (Secretary of State for Defence), Marco Airaghi, (adviser to the Minister for Defence Industry Aerospace), Enrico Saggese (President of the Italian Space Agency) and Marin Chintoan-Uta (Head of Satellite Based Monitoring Services Marin of EMSA).
The main objective of the workshop was to raise awareness on the potential of space-enabled applications for the benefit of user communities in their business. Applications activities were divided into several categories including environment, transport, consumers & capacity building, partnership with ARTES applications, dual-use safety, water management & fisheries and maritime surveillance.
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Presentations highlighted the achievements of past and current ARTES applications activities. For instance, Amnon Ginati highlighted the FlySafe web service which provides near real-time information and forecast on large scale bird mobility in the air space of The Netherlands and Belgium. The success of FlySafe has facilitated the establishment of the start-up company ROBIN Radar Systems BV (a spin-off of TNO).
During the 2 day workshop special focus was given to the importance for industry to identify and characterize profitable opportunities which are based on services using satellite technologies. The reasons to invest in downstream satellite-based services are various, with the downstream market potentially growing to a billion euro industry.
Several times it was highlighted that the ultimate objective of the ARTES Applications Programme is to foster partnerships which create sustainable business models and bring benefit to all the partners involved in ongoing service delivery. Service sustainability based on 3rd party funding is being demonstrated in initiatives such as Space for Med done in collaboration with the European Investment Bank. Also in the first IAP Prize which was jointly co-funded by MT Aerospace. Nick Barnard (DKE-Aerospace) delineated the investor.s perspective in what the investors need to know before committing capital: i.e. how the return on investment will be generated, what the risks are, how those risks are mitigated, and what are the competing strategies among partners.
Workshop participants were also able to see "live" almost 20 projects on display in a special demonstration corner.