SME R&D PRACTICE

Planning a whole R&D Strategy from an insect trap

GeoDouro is an engineering company specializing in geographic information systems (GIS), Geographic Information Systems, Topography, Cartography, Bathymetry, 3D Modeling, Land Registry / Land Services, and Infrastructure Registration. It has been operating in Portugal for more than one decade. Without any R&D practice, the company challenges us to help them leap forward with new projects and services.

With headquarters within Douro Valley, we help design the first collaborative R&D project for the wine industry, aiming to tackle a vital wine industry problem. Due to the increasing consequences of climate change, vineyard pests have become a severe threat to grape quality and viticulture yields. Estimating the quantity and type of treatments to control these diseases is particularly challenging, mainly due to the unpredictability of the dangers and difficulties in performing risk monitoring. Usually, wine producers monitor this by deploying insect traps, which attract the insects and allow a human operator to identify them.

The project EyesOnTraps, “Smart Learning Traps for Vineyard Health Monitoring”, proposed a mobile solution for plague prevention, supporting local temperature registration, automated insect detection in traps, and treatment recommendations for detected plagues to lessen human error and improve analysis. The system architecture will consider modularity and scalability to allow future system expansion to support detecting new insect types.

We helped create an R&D consortium with the Fraunhofer Institute and ADVID, the Association for the Development of Viticulture in the Douro Region. We also supported the application to the EU funds that resulted in 410.000€ for this EyesonTraps Project. It was the first R&D project for this SME in late 2019.

Since then, we have been helping this SME establish an internal R&D nucleus in a permanent and valuable relationship with scientific research organizations, like universities and research centres. After just two years, we are proud to contribute to a real upside to this SME in working to embed scientific knowledge into their product and services.

At the end of 2021, we just helped this SME catch more EU funding for 3 R&D projects, resulting in more than 1,2 M€. With this strategy, We also get 2020 an attractive R&D Tax Credit (SIFIDE) for GeoDouro company. Remember, it begins only with an insect trap!

Contact us if you are interested in getting our advising services for R&D activities or R&D tax credit.