launch report

CREATE is a partnership with:

CREATE (Connecting Rural Enterprise for A Transnational Economy) is an innovative new project joining a group of like-minded organisations spanning public sector authorities, private sector representative groups, and business development agencies from France, the UK, Ireland and Belgium, who share a joint vision of encouraging economic development.

The £2.6m - £1.3m ERDF Project funded through the INTERREG IVB programme aims to develop and pilot best practice techniques, which encourage rural small to medium enterprises (SMEs) to take up and fully

exploit the potential of faster broadband. CREATE can also help SMEs identify opportunities to work with other small rural businesses across North West Europe to share best practice and learning.

CREATE looks to overcome the barriers to growth and competitiveness experienced by SMEs in predominantly rural areas. These barriers include geographic isolation, lack of infrastructure, lack of scale, poor joint working opportunities and critically, lack of ICT expertise. Faster broadband and advanced ICT have the potential to overcome these barriers and transform the productivity of rural SMEs.

The project was launched with two events – an evening reception and day seminar - on 23rd and 24th of September 2013 at the Town Hall in Hereford UK.

evening reception

The attendees were welcomed by Cllr Graham Powell, Cabinet Member for Broadband at Herefordshire Council. The Council is the lead partner in CREATE who believed the partners’ involvement in the project would help them collectively realise the economic potential of their local economies and of the respective regions’ investment into Broadband infrastructure. He went on to say that through CREATE the partners could “ensure businesses receive the support and advice they need to compete in a global market, and realise the benefits of faster broadband.”

The delegates then heard about the value of interregional cooperation from the perspective of the UK’s West Midlands MEP Anthea McIntyre and Deputy Timmy Dooley TD from the Mid-West of Ireland.

Anthea said “learning lessons from the different approaches taken by partners would be crucial to generate the most effective way of encouraging economic growth in the regions.” She added that “The opportunity provided by digital communication was revolutionary for the sustainability of rural areas, knowing the partner regions were at the forefront of this emerging area was something for which they should all be proud.”

Deputy Timmy Dooley outlined the benefits of ‘going transnational’ in terms of the ability of EU projects to reduce development costs and achieve efficiencies as well as highlighting the importance of ICT to

SMEs in the partner regions in their efforts to remain competitive in the marketplace. He also outlined a call to action that CREATE alone was not enough and that the EU would need to increase its investment in broadband provision and back-haul capacities if the aims of CREATE were to be achieved across the more rural regions of the EU

the regionS

The Partners including Herefordshire Council, the European Regions Network for the Application of Communications Technology, Voka – Chamber of Commerce West Flanders, Nièvre Numérique, Scottish Enterprise and the Mid-West Regional Authority, then gave a brief introduction to their territory and economy as follows;

•HerefordshireUK •CountyDonegal&DerryCityIreland/UK •NievreFrance •RuralScotlandUK •Mid-WestIreland •WestFlandersBelgium

Each region will be profiled in more detail in the future CREATE e-newsletters.

The evening session was closed with a magnificent performance by the ‘Lay Clerks of Hereford Cathedral’ singing a range of folk songs from the partner nations, as well as a remarkable rendition of an ABBA classic!

the launch

Project leader Matt Smith gave an overview of the CREATE project. It aims to overcome the barriers to growth and competitiveness experienced by SMEs in the rural areas of North West Europe (NWE) and the structural deficits of the rural economy including;

•Geographicisolationfrommarkets&skills •Lackofinfrastructure •Lackofscale •Poorclusteringopportunities •LackofICTexpertise •Needtodiversifyawayfromrelianceon traditional sectors •Butalsotoimprovecompetitivenessof traditional sectors

Faster broadband and advanced ICT have the potential to transform the productivity of rural SMEs. Matt noted that while many of the partners had recognised that by investing a cumulative €210m to

overvieW oF create

build a faster broadband infrastructure in rural areas, it was now essential that the investment translated into economic growth. CREATE would enable the partners to understand the best ways to encourage SMEs to optimise their ICT and achieve that growth by providing;

•Specialistsupportthroughbusinessadvisors •Accesstoe-guidesprovidingideasonhowtouse broadband effectively •Accesstovirtualcloudclustersenabling businesses to collaborate with others regardless of their location •Accesstospecialistexpertstohelpbusinesses up-skill, network and collaborate to develop new products and markets

DaY SeMinar

CREATE’s aim to increase economic competitiveness in rural NWE is underpinned by four headline objectives; •Understandtheprinciplesofeffective demand stimulation •Developandenhancethoseprinciplesandcreate stimulationtools&materials •Deploythosetools&materialstoSMEsto increase the adoption of advanced ICT and faster broadband and offer SMEs channels for transnational collaboration

Each will be addressed by distinct work package:

Work Package 1 will assess the best practice principles of demand stimulation, and establish a transnational Leadership Panel comprised of business and ICT experts from each partner region.

Work Package 2 will adapt and enhance successful tools for stimulating demand among SMEs for faster broadband and advanced ICT, including enhancing approaches which have successfully targeted early, middle&lateradoptersacrossdifferentsectors.These approaches will include the development of physical and virtual Digi-Labs, multi-lingual e-guides and a dynamic diagnostic tool.

Work Package 3 will deliver an advanced ICT and faster broadband demand stimulation programme using the dynamic diagnostic tools developed in WP2. This will be delivered by local business advisors, trained, monitored and quality assured to ensure consistency to 650 SMEs across the CREATE regions. The work package will also test a range of small-scale financial incentives.

Work Package 4 will encourage and enable virtual collaboration between rural SMEs across NWE, to demonstrate how the barriers to market caused by remoteness and the lack of critical mass can be overcome.

•Therearemanyopportunitiestodevelop businesses in rural areas, not just in the traditional sectors associated with the rural economy •ICTandfasterbroadbandcancreateresilience, competitiveness&efficiencywithinSMEswhich look to adopt new technologies •Throughcloudcomputingthetraditionaltheory that sector clusters must to be located in geographic proximity no longer applies •Bycooperatingtransnationally,theSMEsof the rural areas of NWE can gain scale, access newmarkets&skillsandcompetewithbusinesses located in areas which are not exposed to the same geographical constraints. As a result they can add even greater value to the economy of new •Byworkingtransnationallythepartnerregionsare sharing experience and collaboratively developing new approaches which will have a demonstrable benefit on their own business community and that of wider rural new

The European Regions Network for the Application of Communications Technology (ERNACT) is a European Economic Interest Grouping (EEIG) established in 1991 which helps deliver practical trans-European Digital Agenda projects for European Regions. It is currently implementing six projects with 44 European regions and cities.

Caitriona Strain outlined ERNACT’s role in CREATE and noted that it would lead Work package 1, and be responsible for communication activities and disseminating information from other EU rural broadband projects to partners. They would also work locally with SMEs in North West Ireland.

Mark Schneider from the West Midlands European Service introduced the targets for Europe 2020, and the way in which Structural and Investment Funds (SIFs) would be aligned in the new programme to deliver a more complementary and cohesive strategy.

CONTINUED...

ernact overvieW & role

eu policY perSpective

Mark noted that there were two key priorities of the new programme which had significant resonance with CREATE;

Enhancing access to use and quality of ICTEnhancing the competitiveness of SMEs (60%)

Mark added that there was a clear lack of understanding among SMEs of how to exploit ICT to increase competitiveness, access new markets and reduce costs, and that the lack of skills in businesses was limiting their ability to use ICT to support their business activities therefore effective demand stimulation was key.

Mark was also clear that the best way for CREATE to influence the new EU programme was through the

Strategic Investment Fund Strategies that were being required of regions. There would also be a chance to influence other regions in the delivery of the ICT priorities of their SIFs.

initial WorK anD BeSt practiceS in DeManD StiMulation

José Manuel San Emeterio Pérez from ERNACT provided an update on the on-going work on profiling demand stimulation techniques and that to date the exemplars fell into one of five categories. There was a call to action to the audience to identify the range of demand stimulation activities, good bad or indifferent, which fell into these categories to enable a full analyses of the characteristics, strengths and outcomes from each typology.

neXt StepS

Matt Smith explained the immediate next steps for the CREATE project and noted the need to recruit to and establish the Leadership Panel to help drive the project. Partners would need to identify willing and skilled people from their regions in the near future. There was also a need to begin encouraging potential business advisors to engage with the project and to get the message down to local businesses. A final call to action was therefore for

the attendees to go and spread the word about the project and the potential for local experts to get involved.

The next public events would be the transnational seminar in Dumfries followed by a series of regional seminars in a few months to present the findings in full of the best practice review.

A new website for the project was unveiled at the event – www.create-nwe.eu. The slide pack and videos of the presentations are available on the website.

The project (createNWE) can also be followed on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

expensive contracts, and for businesses to dip their toes into the digital world without having to embed major behaviour change.

For the more sophisticated, businesses should look to increase their social media influence as that is the way search engines will increasingly start to prioritise searches, and augmented reality offers the potential to develop a deeper consumer interface. Finally, predictive analytics of big data will enable even small companies to spot commercial opportunities.

Food for thought for CREATE was Gartner’s Hype Cycle(http://www.gartner.com/technology/research/methodologies/hype-cycle.jsp)whichcouldenablethe project to tailor its provision to early, middle and later adopters.

CLOSE

The Launch closed following a final presentation by DAVI, who spoke to the delegates from France through SKYPE about their artificial intelligence product and the benefits of being based in a rural area.

More inForMation

Future gaZing technical aDvanceMent oF SMe applicationS

‘Cosmic’ Kate Doodson gave an inspirational presentation which highlighted the way in which technological changes and consumer sophistication provided some significant opportunities for businesses to generate efficiencies and access new markets. Kate observed that ‘Digital Natives’ were becoming the future consumer base and business had to adapt to customers who are increasingly all connected in a fast environment all of the time. As well as opportunities, this also brought some challenges and businesses would need to become much more agile.

Businesses should be looking to become more intelligent about mobile advertising which can be inexpensive and effective. The cloud also enables business to flexibly expand their systems without large scale capital investment. Cloud based software doesn’t require powerful IT systems and enables businesses to grow and contract to suit their needs. Open source software also provides SMEs with the ability to test software before signing up to

CREATE is a partnership with: