Market Guidance is a special service, in the framework of the AAL2Business support action, dedicated to AAL funded projects to continuously inform participants on the commercialization, market uptake and investment possibilities available at National and European level and to match their business ideas with market needs. This guidance is entrusted to the network of AAL2Business Expert Network (BEN) and is a key service to involve projects in AAL “ecosystem approach”.
AAL2Business support action follows each step of AAL funded projects’ life-cycle, providing different services targeted to help project teams to build a solid business strategy, define potential customers and to increase the commercial traction. The final goal is to allow projects to reach market success.
To achieve this purpose, AAL2Business follows project teams at different stage of their development, e.g. at early stage of the implementation or with more mature commercialization strategy, proposing different training activities such as Lean Start Up Academy, Go-to-Market Launchpad and thematic on-line courses (https://aal2business.abako.be/services/). During these training activities, coaches and business mentors advise project teams to build a goal-oriented and well-planned business model or to catch the attention of different typologies of investors and/or potential customers and business partners.
Each project involved in AAL2business activities has the chance to benefit from the support of BEN in each country involved in the AAL program, which has as a main objective the offer of networking and internationalization opportunities to AAL project teams through the connection with relevant stakeholders and to provide information on funding opportunities and financial instruments available in each European country. Besides, BEN promotes innovative technologies for product development and finding out about sector-specific laws and regulations in requestor’s and other network countries.
The BEN Market Guidance is a service (https://aal2business.abako.be/market-guidance/) provided in agreement with the AAL “ecosystem approach”. This approach is more than a network, as explained by Julie Arts at the AAL Forum held in Aarhus: “In an ecosystem approach you need to look at how everything is connected, what are the interdependencies within this system – and you focus on all the players involved, not just stakeholders, and understand their relationship and dynamics. In the case of an organization like AAL in the complexity of being a European network with almost every aspect of societal life involved.”
In this framework AAL programme covers different categories of services such as health & care, living & building, leisure & culture, vitality & abilities, mobility & transport, work & training, safety & security, and information & communication. Involving all these aspects of societal life, AAL helps to create a human-centered technology and prepares the users to become “future users”. All the ALL projects can take advantage of BEN support to increase chances of market success in this complex market ecosystem.
