Tourism is one of the world’s largest and fastest growing economic sectors. Within this continuing growth of tourism, there is a growing trend and a raising consumer awareness for cultural and natural heritage tourism. The ROOTS project aims to: • To create awareness on the topic of cultural and natural heritage tourism, an understanding of the business opportunities it brings and how to capitalise on it individually or as a group of small entrepreneurs together. In this way the project raises entrepreneurial skills and ‘cultural’ mind-sets amongst people and communities active in tourism. • Develop a coherent strategy for enhancing and diversifying the promotion of tourist services and fully recognise, develop and capitalise on the potential and preservation of cultural and natural heritage (build high value/low volume (specialised) rather than high volume/low value (mass) tourism) • To produce the outcome of new innovative approaches to better support competitiveness and employment in particular at regional and local level. The tourism sector has significant potential for the development of entrepreneurial activity, as the vast majority of tourism businesses are small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The main target group are small and micro businesses active in tourism from rural regions with diminishing populations and/or regions which suffer from economic crisis. Trainers, representatives and other staff of tourism-related associations and consulting & business supporting organisations will benefit from ROOTS as well. It is through them as intermediary target group the outputs will be delivered to the final beneficiaries. The project consortium consists of 7 organisations. The majority of the project partners are (tourism-related) business supporting organisations & regional development agencies: NERDA, a non-profit organisation with 17 years of experience in regional development in Romania and 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. EUEI is a training and consulting company located in Denmark. Its activities consists of training, management consulting, quality assurance, evaluation and development of ICT solutions for both private and public sector. BDF is an international project management agency focused on supporting SMEs and schools in the field of entrepreneurship and internationalisation as well as supporting start-up companies. GoU is a large modern university with over 28,000 students and 2,000 staff, offering approximately 1,000 courses. The Marketing, Events and Tourism Department within their Business School has two research groups, the Centre for Communication, Consumption and Culture and the Tourism Research Group. MMS is an Irish VET organisation focused on developing progressive learning programmes and platform for education with special focus on the tourism economy. CLUTUREX is a regional development agency that aims to encourage the development and promotion of the tourism sector in Extremadura. The project uses a clear, complete and high quality methodology, including the 3 phases: Strategy, Development and Implementation. This is expressed in the construction of the results as all results contain activities (for preparation, research, development, testing, implementation and dissemination) covering above mentioned phases. The following results will be developed in this project: - Awareness raising campaign - Manual – How to implement cultural and natural heritage tourism - Manual – How to promote your cultural and natural heritage tourism - Manual – How to set up local ‘heritage communities’ - Training kit – trainer manual to implement a training on the 4 previous results - Online platform & community The expected impact on the main target group of SMEs from rural regions active in tourism, is the creation of new material that enables them to develop better entrepreneurial skills for managing cultural and natural heritage tourism. They can use the skills & competencies acquired to improve the competitiveness and quality of the service they offer. The project will also have a positive impact on the participating organisations, local communities, the tourist, the cultural and natural heritage and Europe. Enhancing and diversifying the tourism offer remains a subject of high value and to incorporate it into SMEs’ long term strategy, the EU platform will prove to be a very useful resource on the long run. The platform will serve as an Open Educational Resource (OER) and publish all developed IOs. This ensures that SMEs and all other interested parties can download the materials developed and legally and freely copy, use, adapt and re-share them.
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.