This document outlines the perspectives of SMEs (small and medium enterprises) regarding INSPIRE. It identifies their main goals of revenue and providing quality services at competitive prices. However, it also discusses their main barriers, such as public administrations prioritizing cost and viewing themselves as capable of implementing INSPIRE alone. Additionally, large international companies have taken over much of the market. The document proposes opportunities for SMEs through education, open data/software, research projects, and consortia. It calls for more open data, public-private partnerships focused on SMEs, research funding, and simple yet non-trivial INSPIRE specifications.

1. An SME‘s perspective
Dr. Christine Giger (giger@giger-geoit.ch)
Owner of Giger GeoIT (SME in Switzerland)
Member of Management Board of the Swiss Organisation for Geoinformation
(EUROGI member)
Mandated as Swiss National Contact Point for INSPIRE

2. SME’s main goals
➞Revenue!
➞Best services for best prices for our
costumers!
smeSpire Workshop, INSPIRE Conference, Firenze, 2013, Dr. Ch. Giger 2

3. SME’s main barriers
➞ Costumers are public administrations:
– The cheapest wins!
– Small enterprises (< 8 staff members) have (nearly) no chances winning public tenders
according to WTO GATT rules  not regarded as “stable” enough
– National language is important! Barrier for offering services in other countries
– Administrations think they can do it easily on their own:
• “INSPIRE-readiness” of commercial and FOSS SW is overestimated
• Complexity of implementing interoperable and INSPIRE-compliant SDI is underestimated
➞ Universities do not properly educate on INSPIRE/SDI knowledge
– Administrations as well as SMEs do not find well-educated staff
– Lack of proper post-graduate/professional education in the national language
– Education is expensive for small administrations as well as for SMEs!
➞ Large (US) enterprises take the market
– E.G. ESRI and Intergraph changed their roles in the recent years:
• From pure vendor/SW provider role to “solution-oriented”, also offering consulting and engineering
services
• Former (European) SME partners (who offered consulting and engineering services) were bought in
the last 5 years
➞ Substantial geodata and high-quality metadata is still not available (sometimes
due to political issues: data protection)
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4. SME’s opportunities
➞Education (especially short courses) can be part of
the business model for an SME
➞Availability of open data
➞Availability of open source SW in main stream IT
➞Participation in open source development projects
for public administrations
➞Independent and (SW vendor) neutral consulting
➞Participation in dedicated R&D projects for SMEs
➞Being part of consortia for bigger projects
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5. SME’s wish list
➞ Increase the availability of reliable, well-documented open
geodata
➞ Provide more PPPs opportunities with focus on SMEs
➞ Increase opportunities and programmes for R&D for SMEs
➞ Keep specifications for data/metadata/services (as) simple
(as possible) in INSPIRE!
But: STOP communicating INSPIRE/SDI implementation
were simple!
➞ Public funding for SME education/training needed:
– Help local SMEs with training material in local languages
– Be more aware that SMEs can nicely think globally but they are
acting locally!
– Be aware that all training/education/research activities are much
more expensive for small enterprises than they are for
medium/large enterprises
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