09/16/2023 - 09/15/2026 (101121518)
Breaking silos in the tourism industry: cross domain open innovation supporting the twin transition for SMEs (Cross-Re-Tour)
Project goals
The proposed project Cross-Re-Tour will provide tourism SMEs with access to, and knowledge about, digital and green tools and business solutions in use in other sectors or large tourism corporations and show potential for testing, implementation and scaling up in SME business operations. Cross-Re-Tour supports the uptake and improvement of existing solutions and best practices, through financial and technical support, as well as transnational and cross-sectoral collaboration, whilst monitoring the potential of replicability and scalability of digital and green innovations by SMEs in other countries.
The goal of this project is not to facilitate design of new innovations. Cross-Re-Tour searched to transfer, replicate, and scale up solutions developed for operations and client and staff nudging in other domains and sectors (and potentially in larger tourism companies), towards SMEs in tourism and thus facilitates a process of open innovation.
Activities:
This main objective will be achieved by focusing on 3 concepts:
1) Re-Tour
- The starting point of the Cross-Re-Tour vision is to re-connect to the existing knowledge base of tourism SMEs. This will be done through the technique of online dialogues. The goal is to understand knowledge gaps and information constraints that SME owners face, while moving towards the twin transition.
- Re-Tour will also present a market scan, an overview of existing state of the art solutions to digital and green constraints in other economic sectors, which may be applied in 6 key areas related to tourism SME business operations: water, energy, food, plastic, transport and furniture and equipment.
2) Co-Create
- Based on the input from the Re-Tour phase, Co-create starts with the application of an online diagnostic tool that allows for measuring and assessing SME’s potential to replicate and adapt existing solutions in digital and green challenges, as developed in other economic sectors.
- Next to this, Co-create includes a knowledge hub, addressing knowledge constraints and proposing solutions, based on inputs of the Re-Tour phase. It starts to target businesses and stakeholders from other industries that could connect to tourism. It offers business advisory services, training activities to SMEs participating and acts as a matchmaker, bringing together 160 tourism SMEs searching for digital and green solutions in their business operations, with suppliers of existing solutions developed in other sectors.
3) Cross-Tour
- Cross-Tour is developed along two lines. The first is the key activity of he project and is a cross-domain open innovation programme. This is an open call for applications that will provide 80 tourism SMEs and their partners from 8 countries with financial support (up to 30K).
- The final Cross-Tour set of activities relate to communication, dissemination and commercialisation of knowledge and innovation projects supported. The 80 innovation projects shall be presented during a show-and-share event, combined with an investors’ pitch.
Project results
Cross-Re-Tour supports European tourism SME towards their twin (digital and green which includes Circular Economy, CE) transition processes. It promotes uptake and replication of tools and solutions developed in other sectors, to further mainstream green and circular tourism business operations. In this way Cross-Re- Tour contributes to regenerative tourism approaches.
Project contact person: Iveta Šķiliņa, e-mail: iveta@celotajs.lv, phone: +371 26375380.
