Digital and Sustainable Service Innovation for the Cultural and Creative Sectors Erasmus Project

Project Title

Digital and Sustainable Service Innovation for the Cultural and Creative Sectors

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Partnerships for Creativity

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Open and distance learning; Creativity and culture; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses

Project Summary

CONTEXT
The cultural and creative sectors (CCS) are among the most severely impacted sectors of COVID-19 causing unemployment and precariousness on labour affecting circa 8,7 million people working on the CCS sectors in the EU and 1,1 million cultural enterprises, and hence hampering re-entering to and entering to labour markets for the first time. Consequently, the activity of the sector diminishes. The situation may cause irreparable damage and a permanent decline of the cultural and creative sectors in Europe, and their consumption impacting well-being and cohesion of the communities, and impacting other sectors too, such as tourism.

CCS sectors need permanent, adaptable and sustainable solutions to tackle societal change caused by the COVID-19 and any other new ones. The current crises has impacted labour markets of the sector and the sector’s product/service delivery as well, and as the situation shows, the current skills of the CCS workers are not enough to tackle these challenges. There is a need to upgrade the skills of unemployed, employed, self-employed and micro and small organisations in the CCS sectors to make them able to tackle challenges created by the COVID-19, any prospect challenges, and the negative development of the labour market situation, in order to maintain and obtain employment on the CSS sectors.

OBJECTIVE
ServiceDigiCult project aims to tackle the aforementioned challenges created by COVID-19 by developing skills of unemployed, employed, self-employed and micro and small organisations in the CCS sectors to tackle the challenges COVID-19 and upcoming challenges in a sustainable way to help them to maintain and enter to employment, and being able to employ self and others. The skills areas to tackle focus on innovating and reinventing services, making service of products, to be delivered to customers in a new society harnessing digitalisation into it, and strategic foresight to tackle any future challenges and changes.

For this purpose, ServiceDigiCult project aims to create an online training and toolkit of service innovation for the cultural and creative sectors in order to foster their service innovation and development into novel and sustainable solutions which can also be provided digitally. Service innovation and design can be used for rethinking own product offer into new services using for instance digitalisation. Hence, the project uses creative methods to tackle the challenges of the CCS sectors. Training will be supported by handbooks for the learners and trainers on how to use training and the toolkit, and a sustainable strategic foresight guide to create readiness to foresee and react to societal and sectoral changes using the service innovation.
The training can be used as autonomous online training independent of time and place, but also as trainer-led blended or virtual learning. The toolkit and the materials are freely and openly available online to ease the access to them and the use of them. The training methods will combine for example, the toolkit, text, videos/webinars, examples, and empathy-and user-based tools.

ACTIVITIES – METHODOLOGY
The activities and the methodology of ServiceDigiCult are:
O1 Competency Framework – Desk research, interviews and surveys.
O2 ServiceDigiCult Training and toolkit for Online and Blended learning – Training and toolkit outline design, training material and platform development,
O3 Handbooks for Implementing ServiceCult Training, which benefit from piloting the ServiceDigiCult training in the IO3,
O4 Sustainable strategic foresight guide – to increase the subjects’ ability to foresee changes on markets and to react on them in a proactive, sustainable and strategical way, and apply this in the service innovation.

PARTICIPANTS
Target group 1: unemployed, employed, self-employed and micro and small organisations in the cultural and creative sectors in the EU needing novel service innovation training tailored to their needs
Target group 2: cultural actors, promoters and enhancers, such as municipalities and cultural organisations and associations, service design and design professionals, enterprise organisations and developers, obtain cutting-edge training material to support the target group 1.
The project is expected to engage circa 12340 representatives of target groups and stakeholders, of which in intellectual outputs 60 representatives of the target group 1, 40 of the target group 2, and 20-40 representatives of general public.

RESULTS, LONG-TERM IMPACT
Increased ability of the unemployed, employed, self-employed and micro and small organisations in the CCS sectors to innovate services to be delivered to the public also digitally in a sustainable and strategical way. This is expected to upskill people in the CCS sectors to better tackle the challenges of and recover from the crises created by the COVID-19, and to improve their employability potential and the employment situation of the sector.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 208438 Eur

Project Coordinator

OY VAASAN AMMATTIKORKEAKOULU – VASAYRKESHOGSKOLA AB & Country: FI

Project Partners

• CLUB 9000
• Fundacja Rozwoju Aktywnosci Miedzynarodowej i Edukacyjnej – FRAME
• INOVA CONSULTANCY LTD
• Österbottens Hantverk rf
• EUROPEAN CENTER FOR QUALITY OOD