Learnings from RCIA staff exchange
The Tyrolian partner IDM Ecosystem Film & Creative Industries team visited AWS, the Lead Partner of RCIA, in Austria from 15th to 20th April for the first RCIA Staff Exchange!
The core topics visited at the staff exchange were:
• Creative Industries Strategy Austria
• Services and Strategy of WKO, AWS, Departure, Creative Region Linz, Federal Ministry of Digital and Economic Affairs
• Update and Feedback Creative Industries Strategy, Project Design, Creative Industries Strategy South Tyrol
Learn more here about what happened during this first staff exchange.
Staff exchange is an excellent opportunity for RCIA partners to learn from each other’s good practices and get insights into how other partners work with CCIs regionally. Here are the insights from the participants.
What are the main challenges in your region that you were hoping to address with the staff exchange?
With reference to the European S3 Strategy of 2014, the Autonomous Province of South Tyrol defined its strength fields, and Creative Industries is one of the excellence areas defined. All strength fields of South Tyrol are represented within the special agency of IDM in the structure of Ecosystems, and since 2018 the Ecosystem “Film & Creative Industries” has additionally been established.
The objective of the Film & Creative Industries Ecosystem is to boost the local creative industry and make it more competitive. The network addresses and discusses topics and trends relevant to the industry in thematic working groups. Company representatives network with creative professionals in order to develop innovative ideas, products and services.
South Tyrol’s creative industry still has considerable untapped economic potential and there are countless innovations waiting to be discovered. The aim of the Ecosystem is to unlock this potential and put it to good use for the benefit of other economic sectors as well.
The main challenges of the region are that the many different small actions in the creative sector are not really coordinated. In addition to that, R&D activities of local companies are just a small amount and the Ecosystem want to increase the R&D activities and support local SMEs on their innovation process.
In order to better understand and support SMEs and actions addressed to them, the Ecosystem Film & Creative Industries is working on developing a Creative Industries Strategy for South Tyrol. A quantitative and qualitative survey will be carried out to obtain a situation analysis of the local creative industries. Through the collected and interpreted data, and thanks to outputs of the Interreg Europe RCIA project, a strategy paper with recommendations and guidelines for local actors and stakeholders will be developed.
In this process, local creative industries will also be involved, to achieve a cooperative engagement and promote networking opportunities that will strengthen SMEs' competitiveness by:
• Strengthening the South Tyrolean innovation system
• Strengthening the competitiveness of the creative industries
• Strengthening the transformative impact of the creative industries on other sectors of the economy
• Awareness Creation and strengthening of South Tyrol as a creative economy location
What are the learnings you take home from this Staff Exchange?
• Avoid defining measures for each creative industry sector, but instead define measures that all CI sectors can benefit from
• Bring to the CI sectors roundtables not just companies representatives, but also policy partners who could be important for the implementation of the measures obtained during the qualitative analysis
• Integrate companies and relevant players of Creative Industries from the beginning of the process, to stimulate a bottom-up approach
• Establish a Creative Industries Board that meets once per year with the mission of monitoring and evaluating the defined measures
Which of the learnings could also be applied/ transferred to your Region?
Each of the learnings can be transferred to South Tyrol, keeping in mind the different situation of the region, which is at the beginning of a development process in the Creative Industries field.
What are barriers in your Region?
- The majority of South Tyrolean companies are micro, small and medium enterprises, with up to 10 employees
- The percentage of R&D investment is about 0.75%, which is a very low amount, considering the need of innovation for increasing companies' competitiveness
