NIMBLE is funded by the European Commission’s H2020 technology research programme for Factories of the Future, grant agreement No 723810.

The ultimate goal of NIMBLE is to develop a federated, multi-sided and cloud services-based business ecosystem that supports:

  1. B2B collaboration for industry, manufacturers, business and logistics;
  2. ICT-based innovation of products and evolution of traditional business models;
  3. federated, competitive yet interoperable instances of the platform

In contrast to many other, often venture capital (VC) funded platform initiatives, NIMBLE is multi-sided by bringing together vendor and buyer communities, and it is also federated. This means we enable competition between platform providers (see picture below) and yet, we ensure their interoperation via the interoperability services that remain the same for all.

The picture above depicts the high-level objective of the project: federated platform providers give different sectors or regions a platform instance for B2C, B2B and M2M collaboration. The regional or sectoral platform instance is capable of interoperating with other platforms in the federation via semantic interoperability services that are shared by all. Specialisations would be necessary to account for sector specific practices and standards, and localisations may be necessary to deal with national laws, regional practices and preferences regarding official languages. Therefore, NIMBLE needs to achieve the following objectives:

  1. create a platform ecosystem to attract early adopters: providers, vendors, buyers, collaborating using federated platform instances;
  2. ensure ease of entry and initial ease of use with quick rewards;
  3. grow platform usage by showing the benefits and by adding services where the need arises (release early, release often);
  4. master the usage of the platform step-by-step to evolve business cooperation;
  5. from the earliest steps to master-level, ensure trust, security and privacy.

Further information about project implementation are reported in work plan page.