A services and business incubator for geospatial open-source developments

Expected Outcome:

Project results are expected to contribute to all of the following expected outcomes:

• strengthened European competitiveness in the environmental and Earth Observation service industry, including climate services and analytics services for nature and biodiversity, through leadership in open-source geospatial, including compute capabilities, software and algorithms, facilitating the integration of Earth observations and other geospatial data, models and software into sustained business opportunities;
• strengthened strategic sovereignty of the European open geospatial developer and geospatial software community with increased economic sustainability;
• accelerated transition of critical European open-source geospatial software assets and innovation towards sustainable business ventures.

Scope:

Open-source geospatial software ecosystems form a critical digital infrastructure for climate services, agriculture, biodiversity, environmental monitoring, and beyond. While Europe is home to world-class developers and software assets used globally and presenting the backbone to the modern geospatial sector (e.g. GDAL, QGIS, Pangeo stack, etc), their long-term sustainability remains challenged by fragmented, voluntary support, low visibility in funding and investment channels, and limited access to business knowledge and opportunity tailored to open-source development models.

Importantly, many open-source projects already operate at high technology readiness levels (TRL), with active user communities, broad adoption, and demonstrated product-market fit. However, these projects often lack the business frameworks and institutional support necessary to facilitate long-term sustainability, resilience and European software sovereignty. Their challenges are distinct from those of early-stage research projects or conventional start-ups, and they require tailored approaches to governance, licensing, service monetization, and maintenance.

To address open-source geospatial specific challenges, proposals under this topic should:

• establish a business incubation and support hub for the geospatial open-source community in Europe, acting as a single-entry point to foster entrepreneurship and sustained open development across critical geospatial open-source projects. To this end, the hub should identify and develop pathways for open-source geospatial software communities to partake in viable business opportunities, fostering innovation and entrepreneurial growth within the open-source ecosystem and working towards long-term sustainability of the critical geospatial open-source software ecosystem;
• analyse the European market and innovation landscape, to identify current and future demands for geospatial open-source software across public and private sectors, identify gaps and business opportunities for commercial uptake of open-source software and the creation of business models;
• in collaboration with the European geospatial and open-source communities, including established organisations, such as NumFOCUS, OSGeo, Linux Foundation and others, proposals should identify, and catalogue critical geospatial open-source software projects, and support fundamental, mature open-source projects with high TRL and demonstrated user traction in developing sustainability and sovereignty strategies, including tailored business strategies, IP models (where applicable), and investment readiness, to bridge the gap between open innovation and venture-ready business opportunities.

Proposals should include capacity-building elements and services, such as business mentoring, legal and IP advice, training on licensing and open business models, match making with investors, alignment with European Innovation Council (EIC) selection criteria, and community-building actions for the critical geospatial open-source projects. The applicants should furthermore plan facilitating pathways from critical open-source software to Venture Capital support, such as EIC support instruments, including Transition and Accelerator programmes.

Proposals should foresee a range of 45-60% of the proposed budget for providing financial support to third parties (FSTP), with the aim of establishing seed funding mechanisms to aid identified critical geospatial open-source projects and associated entities established in EU and Horizon Europe associated countries. In accordance with the developed critical open-source software to business and sustainability pathways, these Grants should aid critical open-source projects to implement measures to start identified business opportunities with activities such as administrative and legal set-up, productisation, business development, branding and marketing, etc.