Apply to the 1st Open Call for Tourism SMEs with data experts/organizations and artist/creative professionals

Join the extensive list for Tourism SMEs

To apply to the 1st open call you must join the extensive list: click on the image to discover more!

Join the extensive list for data experts/organizations and artist/creative professionals

To apply to the 1st open call you must join the extensive list: click on the image to discover more!

ECoC-led Ecosystem – Supporting cooperation, capacity building and knowledge transfer among ECoCs (past, present and upcoming)

ECoCs Watch – Boosting and learning how to create a data-driven culture among ECoCs, especially future Capitals, by organizing a system of market intelligence that will help collect and analyze, then provide open access to, a broad amount of information, data, analysis, best practices and lessons learned, enhancing skills and strategies when these using data for tourism development and working at ECoCs’ legacy

Transformative Bootcamp – Building on information and insights from the EcoC Watch to improve the business environment for tourism SMEs. They will be empowered to get and learn why and how to be a data- driven market player through:

1. an inspirational mentoring approach set between digitally advanced SMEs and those lagging behind in the digital transformation process;
2. a virtual programme helping them explore and learn data-driven approaches that they could usefully apply in their own context;
3. a pattern of Collaborative Matchmaking that will help tourism SMEs move through their digital transformation, supporting them to be more sustainable and provide travellers with more personalised offers and experiences. Each tourism SME will be matched with a) a cultural and creative SME or professional and b) a player active in the field of ICT/digital technology, including data analysts and strategists, that will help the tourism SME develop and/or improve viable and sustainable tourism business models and strategies, including rethinking decision-making and organisational processes, and develop new products and services more accessible and provided with higher value added. Grants of EUR 7,000 will be offered for this purpose to selected cultural creatives, professionals and data specialists, following an Open Call.

ECoCs Policy Lab – Stimulating active participation in cultural and tourism policy making at local and regional level by leading the diverse audiences (public authorities, businesses, associations and NGOs, foundations and communities) closer to data collected through the ECoCs Watch. The initiative is expected to evolve into a plurality of territorial approaches to policy trial and experimentation, each ECoC supported to design its own path to link policies to programmes to funding opportunities.

Evidence-based creative Communication and Dissemination – Creating a link between communication and impact evaluation, involving SMEs in the creation of videos and pieces of stories that will feed project storytelling, and will emphasize how empowerment, learning and capacity building unfold through the project activities.

Our project will stimulate the rise of better accelerator programs in the ECoCs. It will foster the harnessing of collective intelligence and open data, boosting the collaboration of machines and humans from different fields and backgrounds, promoting the use and re-use of data and knowledge as it emerge from synergies among past, present and future ECoCs, tourism destinations and tourism businesses, digitally-advanced tourism businesses and others that struggle with setting foot on this path, private and public players.