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Content archived on 2024-05-18

Boosting the Economy by Assisting SMEs in the Tourism Sector

Objective

"BEASTS" is a sharply-focused 12 month project. Its objectives focus on user supplier co- operation so that the users (SMEs in the leisure and tourist industry in rural areas) can develop a competitive advantage.

The digitalised resources will be from the National Library of Wales and Clip;
delivery will be by Wales Digital College and S4C;
co-ordination and software development will be by Wales Digital College.

The resources used in the trial will focus on the local needs of the SMEs in the target area; the know-how and results of the trial -the technology and the economic benefits- will be disseminated during the life of the project.

Objectives:
This project aims to contribute to the economic development of the tourist industry by ensuring that SMEs in rural areas exploit the potential of electronic marketing and awareness of national cultural resources. The objective of the project is to train and enable the managers of SMEs in rural areas in Europe to use technology and national cultural resources to improve their business opportunities. The project will develop an e-commerce on-line training package and portal service, tested by 20 SMEs. It will also demonstrate the package through digital TV. The current situation is that 70% of SMEs in remote areas in Wales are unaware of opportunities to improve their businesses through e-commerce. 100% of SMEs taking part in the trial for this project will be unaware of these opportunities. As a result of the project's activity, 100% of the target SMEs should be aware of the potential offered by e-commerce and the use of digitalised national cultural resources to improve their business opportunities. Steps will be taken to ensure access to digitalised national cultural resources and software necessary to improve business opportunities for the wider SME audience in Wales and throughout Europe.

Work description:
The project has 6 work packages:
(i) identifying SME needs and targeting of identifiable national cultural resources;
(ii) digitalising these resources;
(iii) development of specialised templates for SMEs use, for access to these resources and for marketing these services;
(iv) development of a quality criteria mechanism which will seek to ensure the integrity and quality of the information and other services offered;
(v) evaluation and dissemination;
(vi) project management.

Work packages 1, 2 and 3 are time specific; 4, 5 and 6 are continuous.

Wales Digital College will act as the overall project manager and will co-ordinate the work in each package. Trialling with target SMEs will take place with 20 SMEs in west Wales.

West Wales has been chosen because:
(i) the economic plans include the development of tourism,
(ii) the area is very dependent on declining industries,
(iii) it is a bilingual area.

All the technology used during the project is currently available. The trial will concentrate on its adaptation and improvement for the specific needs of the users.

Milestones:
Milestones:
(i) Identification of SME needs in terms of training and digitalised national cultural resources;
(ii) digitalisation of trial material;
(iii) development and trialling of templates and interface tools based on existing software;
(iv) evaluation;
(v) dissemination.

Expected results:
(i) a model for commercial exploitation, enabling SMEs to use leading edge technology to further economic development,
(ii) a model for transfer to other member states (especially for SMEs in bilingual areas of rural decline.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.

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ACM - Preparatory, accompanying and support measures

Coordinator

ACEN CYFYNGEDIG
EU contribution
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Address
1 STRYD Y BONT
CF1 2TH DE MORGANNWG, CAERDYDD
United Kingdom

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Total cost

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Participants (5)

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