Grant: CCI Mobilize Grants

Digital maturity is vital to business ecosystem health. Digitally mature companies, ones that possess competence in the use of both basic technologies, such as digital inventories or e-commerce, and advanced technologies, like digital modelling, reality capture or optical processing, are more scalable, resilient, export ready and profitable. However, in Newfoundland and Labrador (NL), "many businesses, particularly those in more traditional sectors, are not fully aware of how they can apply digitization or what specific benefits they could see. And technological solutions are not a one-size-fits- all. . Businesses must have supports to evaluate their needs, identify areas where technology can benefit them, and then find and implement the solution that is the best fit." (1) College of the North Atlantic wishes to expand its innovation service capacity to provide precisely this digital support to its growing list of partner companies urgently in need of it. College of the North Atlantic's Office of Applied Research and Innovation (OARI) has actively engaged its world class terrestrial and airborne LiDAR (Laser Imaging Detection And Ranging), 3D mapping and hyperspectral imaging assets and teams to advance a specialization in reality capture and digitization. To support data-driven digital mapping projects to address the current "digital immaturity" of NL business operations, OARI employs its $3,500,000 portable inventory of reality capture and digitization instruments.To execute on the growing demand for reality capture and digitization solutions for industry, additional human expertise is now required to mobilize fully this technology to reach more businesses to enhance their digital maturity. When resourced with a required complement of Faculty Researchers, the outcome from planned activities is the full-scale deployment of a sustainable Centre for Reality Capture and Digitization in NL. The goal is to continue multi-million dollar strategic partnerships with the mining sector but to expand to other sectors, particularly health care, forestry, utilities, environmental monitoring, and hospitality and tourism. To do this, however, dedicated human resources are needed to deploy this technology to other sectors where it has known, and yet to be determined, applications such as asset digitization and management, analysis of existing and as-built conditions, business information modelling (BIM), and digitization of business processes.