Recognizing cultural heritage Opportunities fOr Tourism Smes Erasmus Project

Project Title

Recognizing cultural heritage Opportunities fOr Tourism Smes

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 : Strategic Partnerships for vocational education and training

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2017

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Rural development and urbanisation; Enterprise, industry and SMEs (incl. entrepreneurship); Creativity and culture

Project Summary

ROOTS project had 3 main objectives:

• In order to raise entrepreneurial skills and ‘cultural’ mind-sets amongst people and communities active in tourism, the project aimed to create awareness on the topic of cultural and natural heritage tourism and an understanding of the business opportunities it brings.
• To develop a strategy, that will help to enhance and diversify the promotion of tourist services, and also to develop and capitalise on the potential and preservation of cultural and natural heritage
• To create new and innovative approaches, in order to support competitiveness and employment at regional and local level. As the majority of tourism businesses are small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), the tourism sector has significant potential for the development of entrepreneurial activities.

The target group of the project consists of small and micro businesses active in tourism from rural regions that were higly influences by the economic crisis.
Another categories of representatives we had approached were: trainers, representatives and other staff of tourism-related associations and consulting & business supporting organisations. The previously described target group, were involved in delivering the outputs to the final beneficiaries.
The project consortium is formed of 7 organisations, from 6 different european countries, the majority being (tourism-related) business supporting organisations and regional development agencies:
North-East Regional Development Agency – Romania, it is a non-guvernamental, non-profit organisation, public utility activity and it is involved in regional development in Romania. It works for elaboration and promotion of strategies, resources, attraction, identification and implementation of financing national and European funded programs and offers services for increase of sustainable economic growth, partnerships, development of human resources and entrepreneurial attitude.
European E-learning Institute – Denmark, is a company specialised in the creation of powerful online platforms, immersive educational evironments and provision of resources tools to create truly valuable learning experiences.
Business Development Friesland – Netherlands, is a not-for-profit foundation which develops and executes projects focused on growth, for people in knowledge institutes (VET institutes and Universities), strat-up companies, well-established SMEs an local governments.
University of Greenwich – United Kingdom. The University Business Schools’s research and enterprise activity is primarly applied or policy oriented. Research is seen as an essential activity for the Business School as a foundation for excellence in teaching and to enable the School to provide contract research and consultancy services to business and the wider community, both nationally and at regional level.
Momentum Marketing Services – Ireland, is an organisation that combines knowledge of the Irish cultural and heritage tourism landscape with their VET specialism of blended learning and professional development training in tourism entrepreneurship, rural economy regeneration, community stimulus training incorporating new approaches to marketing, innovation, competitiveness and business improvement.
Extremadura Network of Rural Development CLUTUREX – Spain, is a resources, information and experiences interchange center that aims to find solutions and strategies for the problems affecting the rural development of the region.

With the purpose of obtaining a useful and powerfull set of materials, the project used a comprehensive methodology, including the 3 phases: Strategy, Development and Implementation. All of the obtained results containing the following activities: preparation, research, development, testing, implementation and dissemination, covering the main 3 principle phases.
The results that were elaborated during the project, are:
– Awareness raising campaign
– How to implement cultural and natural heritage tourism – Handbook/Manual
– How to promote your cultural and natural heritage tourism – Handbook/Manual
– How to set up local ‘heritage communities’ – Handbook/Manual
– Training kit – trainer manual to implement a training on the 4 previous results
– Online platform & community

The creation of new material that enabled users to develop better entrepreneurial skills for managing cultural and natural heritage tourism, had a great impact on the main target group of SMEs from rural regions active in tourism. The developed skills helped them to improve the competitiveness and quality of the services they offer. The project also had a positive impact on the participating organisations, local communities, the tourist, the cultural and natural heritage and Europe.

The EU platform proved to be a very useful resource on the long run, that can help SMEs incorporating a long term strategy by inhancing and diversifying the tourism offer.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 235198 Eur

Project Coordinator

Agentia pentru Dezvoltare Regionala Nord-Est & Country: RO

Project Partners

• STICHTING BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT FRIESLAND
• UNIVERSITY OF GREENWICH
• Red Extremeña de Desarrollo Rural (REDEX)
• European E-learning Institute
• ASOCIACION AEI CLUSTER DE TURISMO DE EXTREMADURA
• MOMENTUM MARKETING SERVICES LIMITED
• Exponential Training & Assessment Limited