Dr John Breslin, who is leading the Eurapp project at DERI, NUI Galway
A new project known as Eurapp has been launched by the European Commission with the aim of measuring the size of the app economy in Europe. The Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) at NUI Galway will run the project along with the analyst firm GigaOM Research.
Eurapp is part of the Startup Europe initiative of the European Commission’s Digital Agenda.
The project will carry out interviews and surveys with players in the app economy to determine its characteristics. A series of workshops and innovation challenges will also take place to crowdsource proposals for how to grow the app economy in the future.
The first such workshop, ‘Shape the Future’, will take place in Brussels on 14 June. Experts will be brainstorming how the ecosystem of developers, platform providers, regulators and other participants in the European app economy can grow in the future. They will also be sharing ideas about how companies can succeed in the app ‘aftermarket’.
Dr John Breslin, who is leading the Eurapp project at DERI, said recent studies on the app economy in the US estimate it has been responsible for the creation of nearly 500,000 jobs.
“In Europe we don’t have the same kind of data just yet, but the region is a strong player in the global app economy with companies like Rovio, SoundCloud and SwiftKey leading the way,” he said.
The June workshop in Brussels will feature invited speakers from the apps industry, from companies such as Samsung, SwiftKey and Betapond.
“Some of the key talking points will include identifying the bottlenecks which are experienced by app developers – environmental, technical, or financial – so that the EU could develop policies to overcome or mitigate them,” said Breslin.
Another goal of the workshop will be to map out the best measures of success for an app company, he said.
