June 27 - July 2
Presenting “Bridging the Gap Between Technical Validation and Societal Impact: Evidence from the Large-scale Edge Computing Piloting Project”
KUL/UBRAD will present COP-PILOT Horizon at the annual conference of EurOMA. KUL/UBRAD participates in the project as an impact assessment partner, with responsibility for measuring the project’s societal, business, and sustainability dimensions across its four industrial clusters. Working alongside 46 consortium partners spanning energy, smart cities, agriculture, and manufacturing, the team’s mandate is to ensure that the value generated by edge-to-cloud deployments is captured not only in technical terms but across the broader economic, environmental, and social outcomes that matter to stakeholders and policymakers alike.
The team’s primary activity has been the design and operationalisation of an integrated KPI–KVI (Key Performance Indicators – Key Value Indicators) evaluation framework. This required an initial requirements-engineering phase in which the needs of heterogeneous stakeholders – technology providers, industrial end-users, public authorities, and citizen-facing intermediaries – were systematically extracted and reconciled. The resulting framework organises assessment across three interlinked layers: technical performance, operational and ecosystem value, and societal and sustainability impact, with a cross-cutting governance and learning dimension.
The work has already demonstrated that making societal and ecosystem value explicitly measurable through KVIs placed on equal footing with technical KPIs, is a powerful enabler for turning promising edge computing demonstrations into durable, large-scale deployments. Early evidence across the clusters points to meaningful gains in operational efficiency, carbon footprint reduction, and public service quality, confirming that orchestrated edge-to-cloud solutions can deliver substantial value well beyond their technical performance.
