Due to the growing internationalisation and globalised competition, this industry is forced to continuously develop new products and innovate in order to maintain the share of the market and the business activity. Along with this need to continuously generate innovative products, the volume of the internal market legislation and technical specifications for children’s products as industrial products are also constantly changing and increasing. Enterprises, particularly SMEs, do not have the resources to know new regulations and standards and adapt their products to these new guidelines in advance, which has negative effects on the competitiveness of European SMEs. The future European legislative framework on product safety will include an obligation for manufacturers to carry out a risk analysis in the design phase and to document the solutions adopted to mitigate such risks. The identification and management of the risks of a product can only be carried out from the base of a broad knowledge of different issues concerning child safety. As a result, companies in the children’s products industry shall not only innovate and come up with new products, but also adopt and maintain a strong quality and safety culture which is found to be a critical element in ensuring continuous attention to product safety issues. The lack of resources and knowledge, especially in SMEs, which stand for 95 % of total industry of children’s products, means that companies fail to assess product safety of such new and innovative products in a holistic manner, which leads to a vital problem for the industry in terms of product risk assessment and undermines their competitiveness as a result. Consumer associations are the other weak stakeholder: according to the Regulation of the European Parliament and the Council on a Consumer Program 2014-2020, one of the main issues to be addressed is the insufficient capacity of consumer organisations, especially the lack of resources and specialists, in the new Member States in particular. The disproportion between the investment capacity (and negotiating power) of some stakeholders and that of societal stakeholders as consumer organisations affects the quality of the consensus achieved in Technical Committees for Standardization regarding product safety issues. As a result of Project SAMNIC, it will be obtain the SAMNIC MOOC. This is an online course with unlimited participation and open access via the Internet on children’s product safety tailored to real needs of industry and consumer associations. This tool will provide interactive forums for users that help build a community for the industry, consumers’ associations, trainers and other stakeholders involved in child safety. SAMNIC MOOC is aimed at key staff of SME's and consumers’ associations (technical staff, quality team, designers...) so as to provide training on safety and risks on children's products as to serve as platform for exchanging experience and collaborative learning between all stakeholders involved in children's product safety (consumers, industry, research centres, universities and consumer authorities). Four different countries (Belgium, Spain, Italy and the Czech Republic) enclosing universities as VET providers, a high number of companies mainly SMEs of the children’s products sector, a research centre and an EU-wide consumer association, participate in the project. The new knowledge and skills acquired through the multi-language SAMNIC platform will enhance: - SMEs technicians’ capacity to assess the safety and risk aspects of the products that they develop and put in the market; it will also establish an organized and reliable control system, minimizing costs and resources. - the capacity of staff from national consumer associations. This will provide some expertise to consumers organizations and help them to increase their participation on European consumer policy . In this way they will be able to participate in technical committees in charge of developing safety standards at national and European levels to defend consumer’s interests and compensating for the lack of balance with industry associations which enjoys vastly superior resources. Beyond the project lifetime, partners will provide specific updated training to qualify new tutors and consultants at the organizations facilitating the course in order to enable facilitators to act as tutors and not always depend on content experts at every edition of the course.
The safety of children’s products is essential when it comes to items intended for babies and children aged between 0 and 14, as they are vulnerable consumers. The level of safety of the products on the market not only depends on what the product is made of, but also who distributes them, the institutions that establish the corresponding safety regulations, the consumers, the competent authorities that monitor the market or the health agencies who determine the incidence of injuries caused by using the products and inform parents about the measures to take to prevent lesions. They all form part of a “community” that helps increase the level of safety of the products that are sold on the European market. Out of all these actors (industry, consumers, the authorities, healthcare professionals), there are two, small and medium sized companies and the consumers, whose lack of qualified human resources in this area limit their chances of being able to compete in the market, and with regard to the companies, of being able to increase the level of safety required by the consumers. The ultimate goal of SAMNIC is to provide everyone who is involved with ensuring that children’s products are safe with an open educational resource on this matter to improve the skills of organisations and the expertise of people. As a result of the European project, a platform has been developed called SAMNIC MOOC, which mainly supplies employees from the industry (especially SMEs) and consumer associations with a MOOC (Massive Online Open Course) on how to assess and manage safety in new and innovative children’s products. The platform also enables users to get in touch with other people interested in the safety of children’s products and share their knowledge. In SAMNIC MOOC, users can join a multidisciplinary network of professionals called the SAMNIC community. To this end, SAMNIC MOOC strives to be more than just a course; it is a community that wants to support the collaborative learning of individuals with different profiles who are involved in child safety (industry, consumers, authorities, healthcare professionals and research centres). SAMNIC MOOC has been developed by means of a consortium that, coordinated by the research centre specializing in toys, children’s products and leisure, called the Technological Institute for Children's Products & Leisure, AIJU (Spain), is made up of a Czech Association for Toy and Play, SHH (Czech Republic), Alicante University, UA (Spain), the European Association for the Coordination of Consumer Representation in Standardisation, ANEC (Belgium) and the Universitat Degli Studi Di Padova, UniPd (Italy). The consortium represents the world of research (AIJU), the industry (SHH), specialized education on children’s injuries (UniPd), consumer associations (ANEC), the platform developer and experts in e-learning (UA). Educational material and an open and free online course - SAMNIC MOOC- on how to assess and manage the safety in new and innovative children’s products have been obtained thanks to the project. The course has personalised itineraries that can be adapted to the interests of the user in question. The course is available in Spanish, English, French, Italian, Czech and Portuguese and it can be done using a computer, tablet or a mobile phone. The knowledge and the skills that are acquired with the SAMNIC MOOC multilingual platform have an impact on the personnel of EU organizations and, therefore, on the work that they do. In the industry, the ability to assess and deal with the risks posed by the products that are being developed before launching them on the market, is a factor that minimizes costs and increases the competitiveness of companies. Moreover, the SAMNIC MOOC course focuses especially on the safety of new and innovative products, which means that SAMNIC MOOC provides companies that want to create new products with an extremely valuable resource to combine innovation and safety right from the design concept. Similarly, the global nature of the course, whose key points focus on child safety, covers the evolving capacities of a child, the legal framework in the EU, the standardization, the hazards or the risk management process, among other things and it can help consumer organisations to increase and improve their participation in the consumer policies on a European level and in the standardization committees, and therefore defend consumer interests much better. SAMNIC MOOC will be included in the courses supplied by the content developers, and what is more, the main video lessons are available on social networks, which means they can be accessed outside of the Erasmus+ project development.