LOCAL CASE/EXAMPLE

Amlogy – Augmented Reality in Education

Amlogy is a Vienna based company which is specialised in augmented reality. Founded in 2016 the company has today 5 employees. Besides the project-based business of creating AR-based solutions for different types of customers, from machine-industry over tourism to fashion, the company has created also a sub brand for the use of AR in education (www.areeka.net). In strong collaboration with editors of school books, schools, teachers and external developers of 3D models and 3D animations a co-creation network has been established which creates today over 20 new products per year. In addition to this Amlogy has also created a whole eco-system, where external partners can sub brand just send their ideas e.g., for new educational content or AR-books, which will be jointly developed using the underlying technology from Amlogy and sold to the public with a revenue share model.

Through the democratisation of such processes Amlogy became the market leader in this area in central Europe and currently expanding to new areas. In addition, the partners of Amlogy claim that their benefits are the ease of implementation, the operative benefits (like teachers having access to a vast database of existing 3D models for their own material) and the access to newest technologies. For Amlogy the benefit is not only the additional turnover but through the close collaboration with users (i.e., teachers and scholars), the customers (usually schools) and developers a much better understanding of the current and future customer requirements and problem development. The good relationships also make it much less probable that with the emerging of new competitors’ customers will move to them if they are a bit cheaper – as customers have learned then enough about the additional value of such inter-organisational collaboration.

SME collaboration with academia – how and why it went wrong

For understandable reasons in this case no names are published….

We are in the early 2000s. An Austrian SME is a on the way of developing a new idea in the area of eHealth – an app, which detects by measuring the breathing of persons illnesses like COPD, but also stress or burnout symptoms. The app development is done by the company itself (15 employees); the sensors are bought from an international market leader.

The market is developing quickly and so are the needed solutions. In order to have a better access to the latest technology developments, the company decides to set up a structured process together with the supplier of the sensors and some medical doctors. A local University of Technology has been invited to the inter-organisational development team. A professor from the university is highly interested and offers also to involve some of his PhD and Master-students.

The first step was to establish a common big picture and some rules for innovation.

So far – so good – everybody was very motivated and willing to move ahead. But after a few months a problem came up: the partners were living in different velocities. Whereas the SME is used to work with Design Thinking, Scrum and Google’s 100-day rule (i.e., in 100 days from the original idea to the first minimum viable product), the university is operating in semesters. Also, the different personal interest of the partners leads to (psychological) problems: while the university was mainly interested in publishing papers and also create some EU co-funded projects, the supplier of the sensors was yes willing to give information on specific questions, but not too keen on joining bi-weekly development meetings.

After the first 3 months of collaboration the SME decided to break up the collaboration, as there have still not been any tangible results…