Challenges and Solutions
As stated by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, “Intensification – higher yields and more intensive use of land – needs to contribute 90% of the growth in global crops production by 2050”, while environmental degradation and climate change are important challenges in an increasingly volatile global economic context.
itk’s mission is to guide farmers in making their transition towards agro-ecology. Itk provides models and decision support tools based on proprietary software so farmers know at any time the state of their crops, their potential yield, as well as their needs for water, fertilizers and pest treatments.
The company created in 2006 is currently operating a strategic evolution from software to the IoT business in order to support its growth. The company is first focusing on smart water management solutions. Due to severe drought conditions in some countries, it becomes a legal obligation for the exploitations to control their use of water. The Company was looking for Smart solutions to develop a new product generation of connected flowmeter.The final products will have to be autonomous and deliver information to optimize itk predictive models. The autonomous water flow will turn a legal obligation into savings.
In collaborating with itk, LETI developed an energy harvesting flowmeter demonstrator able to simultaneously measure the flow and to generate enough power for a long range communication. With no need of electrical connection, the system provides a very low cost deployment and exploitation solution to measure flows in a first step, and then in next generation additional parameter could be added like pressure, water quality…
gateone Support
The gateone-project supported itk to select relevant technologies addressing its product objectives. In delivering a demonstrator to itk, gateone-project permitted to validate the feasibility for the development of a fully autonomous flowmeter integrating energy harvesting in bringing differentiation to solutions under development while reducing complexity and cost.
Impact/What’s next
his collaboration between LETI and itk in the scope of the gateone-project provides a competitive advantage to itk. The availability of the demonstrator strengthened itk offer and support the setting-up of collaboration with IT companies like Verizon. It represents a first milestone in the evolution of itk business model. While addressing a demanding market driven by regulatory requirement and in providing relevant offer, itk ambitions to multiple by 4 its turnover in reaching 20M€ operating income in 2020.
