Interests and relations, regarding the three categories of stakeholders which analysed in the Blog Post entitled “RAINBOW Platform Stakeholder Analysis: The 3 Categories of Stakeholders”, are further investigated in this analysis, in order to identify RAINBOW’s key stakeholders.
Interest vs Power Matrix
The Interest versus Power Matrix is a structured and comprehensive method to illustrate the classification of each stakeholder into one of the four following categories.
• High Influence & High Interest: Stakeholders that have considerable power to influence the specific market and consequently the project’s development and impact and on the other hand, high Interest in the project’s outcomes.
• High Influence & Less Interest: Stakeholders that have considerable power to influence the specific market and consequently the project’s development and impact, but they are not interested in project’s development and outcomes.
• Less Influence & High Interest: Stakeholders that usually follow the market trends and do not have the power to affect it, but they are interested in new tools, such are RAINBOW platform, that will make them more productive and competitive.
• Low Influence & Low Interest: Stakeholders that have neither the power to influence the project’s development nor the interest to exploit any of the project’s outcomes.
The Interest versus Power approach has been evaluated under 2 different perspectives. The first, is the RAINBOW perspective while the second, is the perspective of the stakeholder categories that RAINBOW project is most interested in.
Under the RAINBOW perspective, service developers are the layer of stakeholders that RAINBOW is most interested in. The more service developers use RAINBOW platform to develop new applications the higher the value of the platform. Infrastructure providers have considerable power to influence the respective ecosystem since they provide all the infrastructure for facilitating the deployment of edge/fog technology. However, infrastructure providers are not directly affected by concepts like RAINBOW. Software development platforms such as RAINBOW, have to investigate the infrastructure providers’ policies and hardware in order to be more competitive and viable in the long term. As regards the end users, they do not have neither the knowledge to exploit the platform’s benefits, nor the power to contribute to the platform’s market penetration. Besides the service developer layer, user is also a key stakeholder for RAINBOW, since user’s needs are the those that will trigger the interest of service developers.
The following figure illustrates the Interest versus Power Matrix under the two different perspectives. In the first case, under the RAINBOW perspective, service developers are the type of stakeholders that most influences RAINBOW platform prosperity, while in the second case under the service developers’ perspective, users is the type of stakeholders that most influences the service developers success and consequently the RAINBOW platform prosperity as well.

The following table classifies the different stakeholder types with associated strategies for engagement:

[…] Below you can read a blog post authored by K3Y and originally published at the RAINBOW website. […]