The STARTS Prize’s consortium contributed significantly towards the recognition of the STARTS Prize at the international level and its endurance, and development of the whole STARTS initiative and achieved impact through the following main outputs over the time of its implementation:
● STARTS Prize became one of the most recognizable awards that honors interdisciplinary and collaborative projects at the intersection of art, science and technology to foster new ways for innovation, as the impact assessment activity proved.
● In three years, the jury members singled out 90 most forward-looking projects at the nexus of art, science and technology and awarded 3 Grand Prizes in Innovative Collaboration that opens new pathways for innovation and 3 Grand Prize in Artistic Exploration for most convincing artworks that has a strong potential to influence or alter the use, deployment or perception of technology.
● STARTS Prize winning projects were successfully disseminated at the major annual events, as Ars Electronica Festival and Frankfurt Book Fair, and thus significantly contributed to the development of both: STARTS narrative became one of the major in building the discursive program for Ars Electronica Festival and settled as recognizable STARTS Day, importance and a special role of STARTS exhibition in the agenda; as reported, the involvement of STARTS agenda in ARTS+ track at Frankfurt Book Fair resulted in the significant rise of interest to this track of the fair’s agenda, the number of direct attendees of the STARTS booth and further programs tripled in the project timeframe.
● Along with it, STARTS Prize results were disseminated at 61 events worldwide in 12 countries, among those consortium members gave 23 presentations on the STARTS Prize,
● A grand total of approximately 625.358 people were reached with dissemination events at the consortium partner’s locations and around the world over 3 years.
● STARTS Prize winning projects became the base for the narration-based social media campaigns that proved to be a successful way to increase the involvement of specifically targeted audience.
● As the result of the communication activities the subscribers’ number increased for all the social media channels, from +21,3% for Facebook to +209,8% for Instagram and +259,3% for LinkedIn.
● The partnership with the PR agency Pickles allowed to move beyond the current active STARTS community, and reach a more mainstream audience, outside of the art and culture communities, and resulted in 30 pieces of coverage mentions with the estimated views amount to 135K views with a 31.9M audience.
● Development of the acceleration program as a tool for previously recognized project to foster their innovation endeavours, at the intersection of science, technology and the arts, its design is a balanced equilibrium between freedom to innovate, support provided with mentorship sessions and monetary contribution, and required outputs as testing the projects in different environments, pitching ideas and sharing their experiences.
● Within the policy strand, the relevant impacts of ICT and media innovation through arts were identifies through analysis of the selected projects and communication at the policy events, the policy recommendations were developed and provided an overview to EU stakeholders and national policy makers.
