Priority Area: Sustainable and Digital Cultural Tourism.
The partnership aims to research and develop innovations in the field of digital technologies for cultural heritage and cultural tourism, which could bring multiple benefits to a wide range of stakeholders. Digitisation became a core focus of EU and member states including cultural heritage and cultural tourism. This resulted in increasingly innovation-driven funding policies and in the raise of virtual and smart cultural tourism; the latter heavily accelerated by the COVID crisis. Digital tools are growingly used to manage destinations and promote them, but also to create additional and more intense travel experiences through virtual worlds. Thus includes the long sought-after experience of immersion in ancient cities brought to life and times long gone, while enabling digital transition, business development and diffusion of innovations on the market, sustainable heritage development and social well-being.
Year established: 2021
This sector is currently marked by small, highly specialised and mostly national market actors, while a European scale innovation entity is missing yet. In January 2021 Time Machine Organisation and Thuringia (DE) with Lower Austria (AT), Cyprus, Paris (FR), Saxony (DE), Greater Amsterdam (NL), and Galicia (ES) come together to fill in this gap leverage digital innovation as technologies and media for cultural heritage in Europe with specific focus on international scale. They are mandated by DG REGIO to run a one-year pilot action and develop innovative investment projects to leverage digital and sustainable tourism. VSCT Partnership is a cooperation of regions whose key smart specialisation priorities and activities are linked to tourism and creative industry, and who need responsive strategies to better align innovation activities and value chains.
The VSCT partnership aims to implement effective solutions for bringing innovations to the market and better cope with bottlenecks encountered by regions on digital and sustainable cultural tourism and digital heritage. It has three main objectives: The cross-regional knowledge exchange, case studies on technologies and application, and the establishment of support structures. These support, for example, the access of companies, cultural institutions and universities to funding and investors or the interregional marketing of services and software products for cultural tourism. In the first two years, 1.1 million euros in project funding has been raised as seedfunding; in addition, the members of the partnership are contributing almost 300,000 euros of their own. This is currently being used to set up a Europe-wide teaching and technology platform for heritage institutions and to enable consultancy service for EU funding access and project development particularly for stakeholders.
VSCT Partnership is a cooperation of regions whose key smart specialisation priorities and activities are linked to innovation, heritage, culture, tourism and digital creative industries, and who need responsive strategies to better align innovation activities and value chains.
Some overlaps might happen, e.g. dairy industry side streams value chain & functional ingredients.
tourism, digitisation, heritage, creative industries, entrepreneurship, marketing
Thuringia (Germany) - lead, Galicia (Spain) - co-lead, Saxony (Germany), Lower Austria, Cyprus, Paris (France), Greater Amsterdam (Netherlands), Basilicata (Italy)
No info yet.
