Territorial and International Case Studies and Role Models

The SPECTRA interventions under Work Package 2 (WP2) ‘Capacity Building of Moderate and Emerging Innovator Territories’ target the emerging and modest ecosystems directly, with the aim to engage more with emerging innovation directions and trends, and advanced methods, tools, systems, and structures, enable them to become more resilient to disruption, such as caused by the COVID19 pandemic, to develop capability to turn them into opportunities and develop new solutions to the challenges they face in their environment, as well as to:

• ensure socio-environmental issues are addressed at a very early stage in activities and are an essential cornerstone of strategy for growth.
• become more proactive and skilled in driving innovation, becoming the instigator of new technological solutions (‘bottom-up’ approach).
• engage more in multi-stakeholder discovery process and co-creation.
• become more connected to other ecosystems and other stakeholders in the ecosystem, to expand sharing of knowledge and expertise.

These activities provide for strategies to overcome barriers in addressing these challenges and opportunities, including:

• Lack of knowledge on how to effectively engage with emerging innovation directions and trends – which trends and technologies are most relevant, in what way and for what purpose – having weak association/appreciation of how they need to integrate with the complex requirements of the ecosystem and the entrepreneurs.
• Weak mechanisms and processes via which businesses can engage in collaboration and innovation with external partners and other ecosystems.
• Fragmented eco-system, especially on the cross-border/transnational basis, when considering key players, weak open innovation frameworks engaging the quadruple helix.
• Perception that some existing solutions are ‘solutions looking for a problem’ rather than solving a genuine need/challenge & common challenges exist without appropriate solutions being available.
• low level of connectivity and ‘intra-operability’ between ecosystems.

SPECTRA also recognises that intentional ecosystem-strengthening initiatives still represent an exploratory space with regard to evidence base on what does and what doesn’t work. Providing more space for ecosystem actors to lead the design, implementation and evaluation of these interventions will help to clarify some of the critical success factors. Hypotheses and assumptions will be tested in this SPECTRA approach, before good practices can be confidently defined, and further collaborate to understand where and how different actors are contributing to systems strengthening.

International and Territorial Case Studies and Role Models is a culmination of a task that reinforces the activities begun under Task 2.2 and continued under Task 2.3, which elaborates a set of detailed case studies on how the business support organisations partnering in this proposal interact with other ecosystem players to support innovation in the creative economy sector, with specific focus on dealing with challenges of digital technologies, inclusivity, and human-centric approaches, as well as sustainability.

In the spirit of the Network and its commitment to European added value, the case studies feature examples of how each partner has or intends to adapt best practices from other regions to their own, internationally.

The case studies identify a contact person in the partner organisation who will be available to respond to enquiries from other business support organisations across Europe interested to learn more about the best practices and novel solutions identified in the case study. Role Models are identified in terms of successful cases of start-ups and scale-ups developed as a result of the impact of such interventions.

Case Studies and Role Models included are:

REGIONAL CASE STUDIES AND ROLE MODELS

•  IMMERSE (IRELAND)
• ATLANTIC TIDE (IRELAND)
• GREEN IMPACT WEEK (DENMARK)
• CEED PROGRAMME (IRELAND)
• BYOWAVE (IRELAND)

EUROPEAN/INTERNATIONAL CASE STUDIES AND ROLE MODELS

• SPIELFABRIQUE (EUROPEAN)
• MUSICTECH EUROPE ACADEMY: MUSIC INNOVATION HUB (EUROPEAN)
• MUSIMAP – START UP IN MUSICTECH (BELGIUM)
• CREATINNES (EUROPEAN)
• CRAFT 4.0 (EUROPEAN)
• ACCELERO (EUROPEAN)
• NEBESYS (CZECH REPUBLIC).

Further details of the case studies and role models can be found in the published deliverable under the resources page.