Utilizing Satellite Image Data Planning Projects

The pictures already exist and already have a buyer. The question was whether the same pictures are worth anything to anyone else.

LIG Nex1 wanted to work with Planet Labs, the American company running its own satellite constellation, and the proposal had to make that case. Satellite data already has a market — militaries and governments, who know what they are asking for and have a line in the budget for it. A civilian buyer does not turn up already knowing they want a photograph taken from orbit, so the work was to invent the demand rather than describe it.

That makes it a business question before it is a technical one: what a picture from orbit is actually worth to someone who is not a ministry, and what would have to be true of it before they paid for a second one.

A proposal has to make the thing real enough to be judged while none of it exists yet — and then survive a room. We built the future strategy and the business case, and presented them.