Validation Contracts

What is the PUZZLE Validation Contracts?

To open up the services uptake and testing activities of the PUZZLE Marketplace towards getting more feedback from interested parties, as well as gaining traction for its utilization right after the end of the project, through the establishment of a community of early adopters. 

The PUZZLE project came up with Validation Contracts concept with the aim is to provide SMEs&MEs who deal with cybersecurity, privacy and personal data protection a set of tools and solutions of varied sophistication levels, to allow them to benefit from the innovative targeted solutions that the PUZZLE Marketplace offers, addressing their specific needs and available resources.

Through Validation Contracts Call (Contest) the interested parties were invited to present their ideas on how the PUZZLE Marketplace could complement the development activities of a product or service they are already providing to their customers, detailing the PUZZLE components and services utilized, to prove the applicability, usability, effectiveness and value of the PUZZLE concepts, models and mechanisms under real-life conditions.

PUZZLE aims to employ highly usable cybersecurity, privacy and data protection management framework in two directions: SMEs&MEs and Cyber security providers.

Validation Contracts of €10.000

In the Open Call, the project sought use cases from IT-based or non-IT-based SMEs&MEs with the overall objective to evaluate the Marketplace from two perspectives: 

  • from the end-user perspective for SMEs&MEs in various verticals and domains
  • validation from cybersecurity vendors trying to extend and add their services that are existing in the markets, and how its benefits can be used as extra services.

The PUZZLE Validation Contracts will award selected applicants with a grant of 10.000€!

The selection process was performed by an evaluation committee, peer-reviewed by 2 members of the consortium and 1 external evaluator. In order to guarantee a successful and smooth collaboration with the potential applicants, the project proceeded to an additional evaluation phase, composed of individual interviews.
 

Validation Contracts Partners

PUZZLE Validation Contracts will award selected applicants after a successful validation process. Validation Contracts partners who successfully passed the selection process, met the criteria, technical requirements, and found themselves as: innovation character and originality of the idea, challenges and relevance of the problem dealt with, knowledge of technical and related matters, feasibility and construction of demonstrator, quality of presentation. 
Execution of Validation Contract activities is ten months. Through a series of Innovation Workshops to be held with the participants in the Contracts, the PUZZLE project will also deliver cybersecurity awareness training and share best practices for SMEs, so that along with technical improvements in their cybersecurity, companies will be also able to implement a better cybersecurity culture within their organization. 

 

Validation Contracts Objectives 

 
The overall objective is to evaluate the PUZZLE Marketplace from two perspectives: from the end-user perspective for SMEs&MEs, start-ups in various verticals and domains; and the other is validation from cybersecurity vendors trying to extend and add their services that are existing in the markets, and how its benefits can be used as extra services. 
 
The common objective for SMEs&MEs and cybersecurity vendors is to validate the overall PUZZLE Marketplace and to put the project in the phase that can come up with the validation framework. From this perspective, PUZZLE will be in a position to do user acceptance testing, independent from the predefined use cases or to the extent of the cybersecurity services that will be provided. 
 
The second objective for participation from SMEs&MEs is to run their own use cases and report how these tests went, what they gained from the process, what are the benefits, and what are the results. Extending the evaluation of the Marketplace by running SMEs&MEs use cases and providing the results will also help the Project to prove the wide applicability of the PUZZLE marketplace in various vertical domains. 
 
The second objective from cybersecurity vendors, apart from validation, is to add their own cybersecurity services and report on how the PUZZLE Marketplace is evolving these extra services, which is the added value of such an inclusion.