SIGNATURE

Security market analysis

Our client

This work was carried out under the INTERREG IV, North West Europe funding scheme. Following open competition, InnovaSec was selected as a subcontractor to the project.

The problem

The EU supports innovation in the security sector, but problems have been identified in pulling through this creativity into successful commercial offerings. It has long been believed that this is due to the fragmentation of the security market in Europe. The project wished to determine if this was the case, to determine the size of the opportunities presented to companies and to provide quantitative information to support this analysis.

How we helped

The directors of InnovaSec have many years’ experience in working in the security market and brought their analytical skills to determine the key issues to be addressed. Through working with one of our subcontractors (k-Matrix), we accessed objective market volume data from the European and global markets. We worked with the project to develop an immediately applicable yet extensible description of the market offerings (a taxonomy) and used this to analyse the European supply and demand side.

  • We provided a hierarchical taxonomy for the physical, cyber and personnel security market down to service and product offerings consisting of over 700 individual elements
  • We provided a Shannon information content analysis of the taxonomy to determine its suitability for describing the underlying information
  • We populated this taxonomy with data drawn from a range of sources and comprising tens of thousands of transactions and many thousands of companies and customers
  • We presented these data in both a report and an interactive format allowing trend and "what if" questions to be posed and answered for each offering type
  • Sales and purchase (trade flow) data were presented for each Member State and aggregated for wider global commercial blocks

Outcome

The data analysis from the SIGNATURE project was made available to organisations across Europe to assist with market analysis and new product and service development. (Other clients of ours have used it in determining where to expand in Europe.) The taxonomy presented was further developed and has been adopted by the UK Government for describing export markets in a quantifiable way.