THEME: HARNESSING BUSINESS Opportunity

The geospatial industry is now finding itself aligning with the mainstream market, adding spatial dimension and locational context to digital infrastructure, interconnected systems and business processes. Technology innovations such as Cloud, IoT, Big Data, AI and Blockchain played multiplier roles in expanding the business portfolio of the geospatial industry, bringing in significant attention and investments from mainstream IT and engineering markets, and encouraging a host of startup entrepreneurs. The panel shall discuss technology and industry trends that are driving the geospatial market in the region.

Mainstreaming of the geospatial market has created a big demand for geospatial content and solutions across governments, businesses and consumers. It has also helped scale up applications and value to much larger markets, amplifying overall impact and contribution of geospatial information in the world economy and society. With every added application and consumer, the return on investments get bigger and better. The panel shall focus on strategy and directions in commercialization and consumerization of geospatial technology in Europe.

Keeping pace with the advancing digital ecosystem, it is necessary for national mapping agencies (NMA) to reorient themselves to promote the democratization of geographic data, defining standards, endorsing active industry participation and playing an advisory role in the formulation of policy imperatives for economic development. NMA’s endorsement and active participation in data sharing, open standards, and public-private partnerships will create a vibrant entrepreneurial environment that will not only benefit the industry, but the NMAs as data providers as well; which consequently will contribute to socio-economic growth. The panel shall feature heads of NMAs across Europe sharing their thoughts on the changing role of their agencies and their vision moving forward.

Advent of collaborative environment is giving a new paradigm to the geospatial business, opening possibilities of end-to-end solutions, system integration and platform technologies. Geospatial content, which remains at the core of collaboration, is fast becoming ultimate driver of evolution towards the solution orientation of the industry. The panel shall deliberate industry’s move towards integrated solution platforms, its advantage and disadvantage, as well as the consequent impact to the overall business value chain.

Geospatial solutions are no-longer stand-alone systems. In keeping with the demand of users for a ‘complete’ geospatial solution, the industry has made a radical move towards offering seamless enterprise-wide integrated solutions and its optimal embedment in business processes. Users from major industry segments in Europe will share the value of geospatial integration in their business workflow and their expectation towards the geospatial industry.

A cluster of business that is really leveraging the geospatial technology for enormous benefits — not only commercially but also socially — is the start-up community. Being more technologically adept, the younger generation has tendency to continuously innovate and explore, which made them realize the potential of location intelligence more easily. However, not all young entrepreneurs are able to launch their innovations into real business. The panel shall discuss scalability aspect of start-up innovations, especially with the growing number of incubators and accelerators, as well as the emergence of digital and shared economy business models in the region.