3FOOD

Third Industrial Revolution Consulting Group
European car manufacturers and assembly plants. It is an ideal location for component
suppliers with a multi-customer base to deliver their products easily and directly.” 294
Recently, the Grand Duchy has opened an Automotive Campus: “This industrial site is
dedicated to research and innovation in the automotive sector.” 295
1.7 LUX-TIR Long-Tails and Multi-Sided Platforms. Two new business models enabled by the
Internet, and now the advent of the Internet-of-Things, are the so-called Long-Tail and
Multi-Sided Platforms business models. Long-Tails refers to the possibility of companies
efficiently aggregating a large quantity of very small market niches, each of which would
have been insufficient to support a traditional business model. Overall, this aggregation
potentially leads to a significant market share. On the other hand, Multi-Sided Platform
businesses offer a platform that can be used by multiple customer segments that are not
mutually independent. The paradigmatic example is the Google approach, where the twosides
are the Internet users on the one hand, and companies looking for advertising for
their products on the other hand. The aim of the LUX-TIR Long-Tails and Multi-Sided
Platforms project is to launch funding actions specifically targeted to start-up companies
that are based on these business models, heavily exploiting the possibilities for value
proposition, customer segmentation, distribution channels, customer care, offered by the
Internet and possibly by IoT. It is a new form of Call-for-Start-Ups, not based on the product
but rather on the business model. The definition of the project should be completed by
mid-2017, and the first funding opportunities could be available by the second half of 2017.
1.8 LUX-TIR OTT. The major winners in the business arena of the Information Society are the
Over-The-Top (OTT) companies, such as Amazon, Facebook, Google, etc, who exploit the
possibilities offered by the Internet without possessing any crucial part of the physical
telecommunications infrastructure. At a moment when the discrepancy between offered
traffic and average revenue per unit (ARPU) is growing dramatically, this translates into
growing margins for OTTs and diminishing returns for telecom operators. Clearly,
telecommunications companies in Luxembourg are already deciding their strategy in this
crucial domain. The aim of the LUX-TIR OTT project is to give both incumbents and possible
new start-ups a strong message in favor of the exploitation of the OTT business paradigm.
Indeed, without this component, the Telecommunications infrastructure in Luxembourg
will bring most of its benefits to companies based outside of the country.
294 See: http://www.ilea.lu/html/automotive.html
295 See: http://www.luxembourg.public.lu/en/actualites/2016/03/24-automotive-campus/index.html
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