Inova has just concluded the BlockStart program to implement BlockChain Technologies.
We have developed an IoT platform for Industry 4.0, which has capacities for traceability for cross industries. One of the verticals we now apply this technology to is in agroofood. With IoT sensors from production, logistics, processing and delivery of food products, we can seamlessly generate traceability reports for different product lots. The Blockchain implementation facilitates the data exchange between our platform and third-party platforms, as well as the secure and trusted access to lot data across our users.
The prototype that we developed integrated the Etherium blockchain toolkit with our Plugthings framework. It allows the user to select the sensor data that is necessary for a specific lot and “sell” it to the buyer of the product. This way, the buyer can generate their traceability reports and know what happened to that product. We have implemented Etherium smart contracts and validated the secure exchange of data between users. Now it is possible to generate reports from own production and aggregate data from past producers.
We increased the knowledge about the market solutions and different approaches towards solving food-traceability. This helped us structure our go-to-market approach for the plugthings framework. As we do not target a Platform-as-a-Service approach, but rather Traceability-as-a-Service.
We meet several potential adopters during this process and understood better their concerns and pain points: Usability is a key point.
The idea of Inova DE began with the clear identification of innovative solutions to tackle every-day-problems. Initially in Healthcare, and then across a multitude of industries. The PlugThings framework was developed in that context. It was created to address IoT challenges in the factory floor, to produce an intelligible dashboard and work reports. It soon evolved to many other fields and applications, creating more verticals from it’s core.
