Crowdsourcing-related pilot action: Rent-A-Robot (O.T4.3)

The pilot action was the third of six pilot actions carried out simultaneously in all seven partner regions to test and introduce the new services on the SYNERGY platform for Crowd Innovation.
 
The crowdsourcing-related pilot action “Rent-A-Robot” was comprising of two parts:
  • Collecting available infrastructures via the SYNERGY Infrastructure Sharing Tool
  • Matchmaking with possible infrastructure takers
 
The main challenge was to find and match partners which would share infrastructure while infrastructure takers used the available equipment of infrastructure providers to jointly develop promising infrastructure solutions. The result of these actions were 49 entries in the SYNERGY Infrastructure Sharing Tool related to the Key Project Areas (KPAs) Additive Manufacturing and 3D-Printing, Nano- and Microtechnologies and Industry4.0. This enabled unused and underutilized infrastructures to be shared and joint activities such as trainings on or introductions to the infrastructures to be implemented.

In addition to testing the recently published SYNERGY Platform, the participants benefited from creating new partnerships bringing together infrastructure owners with people from the community looking for available infrastructure. The best & most successful project was awarded a voucher to the value of €5000 that could be used for different services like consultancy, training, business plans, market analysis, research ordering and a lot more (article winner Rent-A-Robot pilot action).

The pilot action helped to raise awareness on and introduce participants to the concept of infrastructure sharing in the context of Sharing Economy. Almost all partners identified some difficulties with the infrastructure matches, i.e. matching infrastructure providers with infrastructure takers, mostly due to uncertainties about this novel sharing concept and legal reasons. Therefore, the general framework and the level of awareness of infrastructure sharing should be expanded.

By including various interest groups from all partner regions, the pilot action had a transnational character. The reproducibility of the pilot action is given, the pilot action can be carried out well in this format in other partner regions or subject areas to raise awareness on the possibility of sharing infrastructure.


In the following we provide you with links to all relevant outputs and tools:

SYNERGY Platform Infrastructure Sharing https://synpro.e-science.pl/infrastructures.

SYNERGY Rent-A-Robot Pilot Action; Image Source: SYNERGY Project

SYNERGY Rent-A-Robot Pilot Action; Image Source: SYNERGY Project