Broadband Research and Innovation Network (BRaIN) by SNG

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SNG's role

Strategic Networks Group is especially qualified to be a core BRaIN contributor, designing surveys, possibly managing the survey deployments and, fundamentally, analyzing results.

Funding

BRaIN can either be funded as a traditional research entity, possibly with sponsorship from commercial or institutional partners, or organized as a SaaS offering – and in that case, each member organization pays a subscription (based on the number of users).

Each local BRaIN member should be treated as independent, and funded accordingly by its main user - particularly when the results will be used for specific network deployment purposes. However, cleaned datasets are accessible for research and benchmarking purposes by all BRaIN members .

From North America, dial:

+1.888.815.2SNG (2764)

From all other areas, dial:

+1.202.683.6SNG (6764)

Ecosystem

The Broadband Research and Innovation Network (BRaIN) ecosystem will be made up of regional development planning actors, digital economy researchers and statisticians around a core execution team:

BRaIN contributors:

Regional/local development planners (to coordinate the efforts)
Survey specialists (to design the survey and analyze the results)
Econometricians (to identify the relevant broadband utilization and impact metrics, and to conduct analysis from the data collected and comparative analysis with national and international statistical datasets)
Sector-specific consultants (to spearhead the design and analysis of sector-specific survey)
Survey specialists: primarily online and phone (to conduct the actual data gathering exercises)
University economic research lab (to help compile and analyze the micro data)
University sociology team (to contribute to the survey design and analysis of the results)
Regional/local branch of the statistical body (to provide and/or aggregate local and national macro data).

BRaIN users/customers:

Policy makers at national, regional or even local levels
Regional/local development planners (looking to obtain the intelligence they need to devise the most relevant broadband-enabled economic development strategies)
Broadband network funders (looking for a due diligence method)
Broadband network deployment teams (looking for action-oriented information in order to adjust their planning work)
Academics: economics, econometrics, sociology, (looking to incorporate the intelligence gathered into their work at regional/local, national or international levels)
National and international statistical bodies (looking to enhance the macro data at their disposal with micro level intelligence).

Next: Set of capabilities

Organization

BRaIN is a light, web-based, virtual “2.0 organization” coordinated primarily online by a small team of specialists, organized locally with the assistance of the most legitimate constituent each region. Depending on regional/local circumstances, this constituent can be: existing “digital economy observatories”, the statistical bodies, regional development planners, university research laboratories or a specially-appointed public servants.

Building on the same core platform, different regional BRaINs can be organized in a federation – at national or international level – where further pooling of the ongoing efforts to understand the development and the impact of the digital economy would be conducted.