Services

Assessment of technology impact on privacy

We help our clients and partners to achieve their business goals while addressing ethics, privacy and cybersecurity concerns in a manner that prevents conflicts, sanctions and loss of money derived by the lack of ethical and legal compliance to national and European applicable regulations. All information technologies must respect human fundamental rights and ensure the rights of people in relation to the protection of their private life, personal data and freedom. The new EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that replaced the Data Protection Directive in all EU member states on May 2018 introduces many new obligations for companies and a comprehensive set of rights for data subjects, including the right to an effective judicial remedy against a controller or a processor and the right to compensation. Therefore, in addition to being at the receiving end of an enforcement action, data controllers and processors may be subject to court proceedings and have to pay compensation to data subjects for their infringements of the GDPR. Our approach to help our clients to avoid this kind of issues consists of a holistic service composed by the following main components: providing a Data Protection Officer to drive the organization’s legal compliance action; mapping the data processed by the organisation to measure its impact on the ethical principles and legal framework; assessing the cybersecurity mechanisms used by the organisation technologies; conducting an impact assessment for all data processing mechanisms identifying ethical, legal and security risks; making recommendations for the implementation of the organisational and technical means to be compliant with the legal framework while ensuring data confidentiality (preserving authorized restrictions on information access and disclosure, including personal privacy and proprietary information protection), integrity (assurance that data is not modified or deleted in an unauthorized and undetected manner), availability (ensuring there’s timely and reliable access to and use of information) and accountability (supporting non‐repudiation, deterrence, fault isolation, intrusion detection and prevention, and after‐action recovery and legal action).

Ethics assessment of technology

We help our clients and partners in the process of critical analysis to examine the effects that the introduction and use of a technology may have on human rights, society, and the environment. This is a complex process that requires a systematic view and consideration of how technology might affect people and society at large in the short and long term. The ethical impact of technology is therefore crucial when developing and deploying new technologies, in order to mitigate the negative effects and maximise the benefits, and to enable developers, organisations and policy makers to make informed decisions. In this assessment, we assist our clients and partners to consider all relevant factors; there are several methodologies and approaches used to assess the ethical impact of technologies, including:

Privacy impact analysis: this type of analysis assesses the effects of technology on the privacy of individuals and their personal information. It considers the risks of monitoring and tracking, the consequences of possible data breaches and the security measures needed to protect users' privacy.
Social impact assessment: this type of analysis evaluates the effects of technology on society and the economy in general, considering impacts on unemployment, social equality, access to education and health, quality of life and environmental sustainability.
Ethical impact assessment: This type of analysis assesses the effects of technology on society's morals and values, considering impacts on social justice, accountability, transparency, human dignity and individual freedom.
Life cycle analysis: This type of analysis assesses the environmental impacts of technology throughout its life cycle, from production to use and end of life.

Ethical impact assessment of technologies therefore requires a multidisciplinary evaluation involving technology experts, ethics experts, legal experts, environmental experts and other stakeholders.

Social acceptance of technologies assessment

Connected, disruptive technologies permeate all aspects of our daily lives and pose challenges to the real foundation of human rights, such as the right to privacy or the freedom of speech. One could say that human values such as trust, accountability, and dignity are mutually influenced by the social acceptance of technologies. We support our clients to conceive a novel way of aligning the thus-far divergent concepts of sustainability, ethics impact, and technological innovation. By combining these three concepts, we respond to the need of a socially responsible innovation ecosystem by developing a tailored methodology for assessing users’/citizens’ social acceptance of technologies, a fundamental driver for technology market adoption. Our social acceptance framework includes six fundamental dimensions over which social acceptability (i.e. perception, motivation, trust, awareness, capacity enabling, and accountability) is measured and assessed through a two-step approach based on an online Sentiment Analysis (SA) – to create structured and actionable knowledge from the web – and the engagement of our client’s stakeholders (e.g. relevant target groups, associations of citizens, domain operators, decision makers, etc.) for the technology co-creation and communication regarding its social acceptance.

Medical device Assessment

We provides advisory support to manufacturers on obtaining a certificate (CE mark) for medical devices. Legal consultants of our team have in-depth knowledge of MDR and experience in this kind of activity within the framework of European projects in the field of health care.
Cooperation includes a pre-assessment and based on its results, the determination of successive steps on the way to obtaining a CE mark. In addition, we can support companies in their relations with notified bodies, which are in most cases authorized to issue certificates.

Responsible Research & Innovation

We love discovering and staying on top of new research to continuously advance our knowledge and to transform it into responsible innovation, taking into account effects and potential impacts on ethics, privacy and data protection. We help national and international partners to handle ethical, legal and cybersecurity concerns on both the research process and the project outcomes, through the legal support for the involvement of human beings in the research activity, the analysis of the national and regional legal framework applicable to the implementing technology and the recommendations for the secure and compliant development of technology. We are a multidisciplinary team that promotes the inclusion of legal and ethical concerns in the design of the technology, researching and producing new knowledge and best practices towards making a conscious and transparent adoption of technology.

Innovation projects financing

Too often, the best ideas don’t get noticed. Especially in Europe, with its endemic lack of venture capital. We accompany our customers trying to eliminate the obstacles to innovation, supporting them in the generation of ideas, products, or services of sizeable business value. We evaluate our customers’ ideas, helping them to conceptualise and concretise them, evaluating the investment required and the return on investment. Thanks to our decades of proven experience in grant writing, we know where to find corresponding financing opportunities, whether they be upfront liquidity injections or fiscal benefits. And we are able to package the perfect proposal to get our customers’ innovation funded. Furthermore, we can connect our customers with our vast network of high-level research partners in Europe and beyond. Let us work together to:

map organisations’ innovation goals
connect organisations with the perfect partners for realising innovation goals
secure the optimal mix of financing and funding for unlocking organisations’ innovations.

Agile and Project Management

We use our expertise in managing complex and international projects for the success of time sensitive projects with high impact in our clients’ organisations. We support our customers’ business objectives with responsibility to implement challenging projects which are ethically and legally compliant. Through our experience in many successful projects and our team members’ certifications (PMP, ITIL, PRINCE2, SCRUM), we apply program, project and service management best practices, agile methodologies and management skills. Clients can be assured that we are trustable and agile in taking care of their objectives pro-actively and with a profound professionalism. We also have the expertise to mentor our clients personnel through the process of adopting a more structured approach to an ethical management of their projects, helping them to move in the right direction to deliver successful and ethically compliant projects.

Communication

The key to success is communicating how you want to get there. A creative idea alone is not enough. In order for our customers to have an impact and amplify their message, they need an efficient communication strategy. Motivating our customers’ reasons for action can engage stakeholders and drive their target audience to them. We are essential at every level, discovering the insight that informs the idea, determining how we target the audience and helping define the channel and content strategies. Our ideas, our copywriting, our creativity, our design, and our technical skills carry storytelling across a host of different channels. We use several tools to create honest and authentic opinions that work across different platforms and speak to the right audience. We can provide:

Communication channels to launch your idea (co-creating newsletters, intranets, social media, multimedia, and print)
Events management to build Networking, animate workshops and organise conferences.
Stakeholder engagement to build up the relationships keeping your stakeholder networks informed and engaged.

Education

We are passionate about transferring all our knowledge to people and organisations, including ethics and law on technology, responsible innovation, project and service management as well as agile methodology. We run management professional training courses in Project (EU-projects) and Service management (ITIL). We also create awareness and train people, in particular scholars and young people, on the ethical adoption of technology, showing the implications of the technology on human rights, to prevent potential unintended consequences of using or implementing it inappropriately. Cyberbullying, cyberharassment and cyberstalking are just examples of such an inappropriate use of technology to harass, threaten, embarrass, or target another person. They are all crimes that can have legal consequences and involve jail time. We believe that by growing awareness, people can learn more about how to avoid and eventually deal with such a kind of crimes.

Market watch

Innovation creates new opportunities and greater competitiveness in the market. We aim to develop strategies that look to how humans have always aspired to learn and hear about new things, in order to be in sync with changes in market forces and channel organisations innovation processes to embrace all these changes. We help our customers forecasting changes in the market, identifies newer market segments, monitor customer pattern of business activities, detect competition and chart out newer business models. We connect data and science to provide practical, concrete, and straightforward answers for business questions around consumers, markets, brands, and media. However, sometimes, changes in business environments pose serious threats. Business opportunities can come from new technologies that help us reach new customers, from new funding streams that allow us to invest in better ideas, as well as from changes in government policies that open up new markets. On the other hand, threats may include deregulation that exposes our revenues to intensified competition, a shrinking market, or increases in interest rates. That scenario may cause issues especially if a company is already burdened by debt. We have ideated an adaptive 4 Step tool to perform PESTLE Assessment to analyse how Political, Economic, Socio-Cultural, Technological, and Ethics factors can impact our clients’ business domain and viceversa.

services

Shed some light on your business

Chose to embed in innovations the values you cherish. Autonomy, dignity, privacy, freedom: there is no reason for these concepts to be separated from technological progress.

What can we do for you?

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