Finland works on innovation and secure midddleware

The purpose of the InnoHub is to assist companies in making actual business out of innovative ideas. The first InnoHub was founded in Singapore by Philips Applied Technologies in 2004. InnoHub is a unique innovation approach characterised by a physical environment, where people from different backgrounds are working  together in a pragmatic and real-life setting.

Together, these provide a platform to create, review and test-bed new products and concepts in actual application environments, thereby speeding up time-to-market. The process is facilitated by combining key competencies and experiences, brought in by Philips Applied Technologies and VTT.

 InnoHub builds on various combined experts synergy to help companies see results from their innovation efforts. Innovation is jump-started by identifying business opportunities, facilitating idea generation, formulating business cases around concepts and developing end-user-validated solutions in a short-cyclic fashion.

For companies, it will be a one-stop-service point: from creating a technology concept to elaborate design, piloting and testing in an open innovation environment. Companies can become members and paya yearly contribution for services, or commission ad-hoc projects.

Ruud van Vessem, VP of Philips Applied Technologies, says  I am very happy with this opportunity to partner with VTT to extend our services to companies in the Nordic and Baltic countries. By using our proven approaches and tailoring them to the specific needs of regional companies, we can foster their business growth. Our experience with InnoHub in Singapore  [last year 30% of the revenue came from non-Philips clients] is that it is very effective in joining forces to speed up innovation and create concepts that really matter and get adopted.

"The Helsinki area is a global hotbed for innovation, and we are proud to start a second InnoHub here. I am convinced that tying our experience to the experience of VTT and the network with the companies in this region, will spark off great new innovations and bring them successfully to business.”

" We can foresee that InnoHub will play an important role in the Finnish innovation infrastructure, complementing the services provided by other players, such as the Espoo Well Life Center,” says Jouko Suokas, VTT’s executive VP.

“Well Live Center Ltd provides premises for InnoHub in the city of Espoo. There are already several companies working in the field of R&D and education in the Center. Its Living Lab concept is a substantial asset to InnoHub. It offers an easy and fast way for piloting in a real environment and connecting the end-users already in the development phase”, says Olli Nuuttila, CEO of Well Life Center.

GEMOM gets underway
Commercial and industrial enterprises spend billions of euros in messaging applications annually. In Europe alone, the annual market volume reaches several millions. Large companies investing in new messaging technology look for resilience and scalability first, while for smaller enterprises cost is the primary factor, then resilience.

VTT and its nine European research and industrial partners are developing a telecommunications solution for critical applications. Compared with the traditional messaging system, which is vulnerable in failure situations, the new self- healing, resilient messaging platform is markedly more secure. Its data protection solution is based on adaptable information security services, system monitoring and assurance solutions that improve system resilience.

VTT’s research is part of GEMOM (Genetic Message Oriented Secure Middleware), a recently launched research project, co-funded by the European Commission, DG INFSO (Emerging Technologies and Infrastructures Security Unit F5), within the ICT theme of the EU Seventh Framework Programme. The two-and-half-year project is scheduled for completion in June 2010.

Ten industry and research partners across Europe, with a total cost of about EUR €5m are involved in GEMOM, with  co-ordination from CNIT – the Italian National Consortium for Telecommunications and UK Q-Sphere Ltd. The other  partners include NR Norwegian Computing Center, HP European Innovation Center (Italy), Queen Mary University of London, JRC Capital Management and Research GmbH, Datel Consulting International (Ireland), Diginus (UK) and TXT eSolutions (Italy).

GEMOM supports a messaging infrastructure which will offer assurance against security vulnerabilities and erroneous input vulnerabilities at significantly lower cost than existing solutions, thus improving the reliability, integrity and availability of the infrastructure. It is concerned with the developing of a secure, self-organising and resilient messaging platform, which enables reliable message sourcing and delivery in security-critical applications.

Thanks to the platform’s resilience, even serious failures will not compromise the system's higher level functionality. The most critical functions will remain available even if a part of the functionality is lost. VTT’s research in the project is focused on the study and development of information security and resilience solutions.

Opening the market and competition to SMEs as well requires the development of a cost-efficient messaging framework that better meets the resilience and scalability requirements and provides assurance against security vulnerabilities and erroneous input vulnerabilities.

The explosive popularity of IT networks, adoption of Service Oriented Architectures and ubiquitous computing are changing our understanding of what the “computer” or even simple applications are. We are on the threshold of an era where the "network becomes the computer”.

Information networks are emerging alongside computers as independent entities that may perform simple software tasks. The GEMOM messaging platform enables fluid, resilient and adaptive messaging which fully supports this shift in data processing and IT evolution.

VTT’s information security research project is particularly concerned with developing proactive security assurance methods and technical security solutions by combining top expertise from various fields. VTT’s information security research focuses on areas such as information networks, equipment and systems for the data communication and software sectors, authentication systems and critical infrastructure.

Source: http://www.vtt.fi/?lang=en
Web: http://www.gemom.eu/public/modules/mastop_publish/