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Developing business ideas for drone technologies
Developing business ideas for drone technologies

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2 Business ideas and business models from the first ICAERUS open call

As you read about in the previous section, organic farmers started experimenting in the early 2000s with the idea of using an alternative recipe (or business model) to conventional farming. They succeeded in achieving organic certification for their products.

Once you have a new business idea, it is important you come up with a recipe and a way to put together all the activities and resources required to transform your idea into an actual business. Business models are just that. They provide a broad design of your activities and resources and show how everything connects together. There is so much written about business models that it is hard to contain it into one week. Throughout the course of this week, you’ll be given various definitions of business models, but as an appetiser, you can think of a business model as:

…a framework or recipe for making money – for creating, (delivering) and capturing value…

(Afuah, 2014, p. 4)

In Prespa, transforming the idea of organic farming into a business model was appealing to some farmers as it helps to protect economic income and sustain the biodiversity of the wetlands.

Ideas on how to make all agricultural practices both environmentally and economically sustainable, whilst closely monitoring both crop health and nutritional needs, are so important and it is at the heart of the ICAERUS project. One way of doing this is through precision agriculture which reduces inputs by targeted interventions. Box 1 looks at a project, funded by ICAERUS, that aims to implement precision agriculture.

Box 1 AGRICLOUD and the SKYFAR project

The ICAERUS project offers financial support and consultancy advice to support businesses and projects that can contribute to drone innovation in agriculture, forestry and rural areas. The aim is to fund projects that develop drone-based ideas, concepts and prototypes which can be introduced to the market.

AGRICLOUD was awarded ICAERUS funding for its project SKYFAR [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] , which stands for ‘School of Sky Farmers’. SKYFAR aims to facilitate farmers and agri-entrepreneurs to be able to integrate drone technology in their daily work. SKYFAR is about designing, developing and marketing a cross-training program on drone piloting/controlling and managing data augmented by drones, together with other supporting technologies, such as GIS (Geographic Information System), ground penetrating radars and light detection.

The ultimate purpose of SKYFAR is to support farmers to adopt precision agriculture techniques, reduce costs and support both environmental and economic sustainability. It offers local and regional workshops with practical presentations, demonstrations and testing of drone technologies in Romania where the project originates from, and also aims to build capacity in the region by increasing technology awareness and adoption, and by making the use of drones user-friendly and intuitive.

Activity 1

Timing: Allow approximately 10 minutes.

Read Box 1 above about AGRICOULD’s project SKYFAR and answer the following questions.

What is the business idea behind SKYFAR?

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Discussion

The business idea of SKYFAR is to provide farmers services related to the use of drones. These services focus on drone piloting and managing data generated by using drones.

What are the main activities that AGRICLOUD needs to put in place to deliver SKYFAR?

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Discussion

AGRICLOUD will undertake the design, development, promotion and marketing of training programmes and the delivery of bespoke workshops. Part of SKYFAR is to offer local and regional workshops with practical presentations, demonstrations and testing of drone technologies in Romania.

What are the resources (ingredients) that AGRICLOUD needs to put together to deliver SKYFAR?

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Discussion

Training material to be used to run the workshops; drones to be used at demonstration events; specialist staff, such as accredited drone pilots; drones and other complementing parts and technologies for the demonstration workshops (e.g. ground penetration radars, multispectral cameras, weather stations, IoT equipment.

With SKYFAR, AGRICLOUD aims to create unique value by providing precision agriculture with the use of drones. In order to do this, AGRICLOUD will need to plan a wide range of activities. The ways that these activities are combined together and how they are governed and orchestrated captures SKYFAR’s business model. In other words:

‘...a business model is a representation of the whole business, what it does, how it does it, who does what, who is the end recipient of the value offering and how value is appropriated by the business.’

(Afuah, 2014, p. 4)

This is a comprehensive definition of a business model. In subsequent weeks, you will find it useful when applying tools, such as the business model canvas, to help you design the details of your business model. For now, you will explore the different types of business models, or the different ways that exist to represent the design and broad configuration of business.