Porto Design Factory (PDF), interface unit of the Polytechnic of Porto, and leader of the Interreg Europe project "RegionArts - Enhancing SME growth by the integration of Artists in ICT projects", organized on the 13th of December of 2018, the first meeting of the Local Stakeholders Group of the project.

When policy-makers design support programmes, it is based on an analysis of the existing ecosystem. Based on this, this meeting consisted of a co-creation workshop focussed on the mapping of the organizations and initiatives that support the Arts and the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for the promotion of innovation in SMEs of the northern region of Portugal and identifying the strengths and weaknesses.

For this initiative, Porto Design Factory invited local Stakeholders, representatives of entities such as the Enterprise Association of Portugal - Enterprise Europe Network (AEP - EEN), the Institute for Systems and Computer Engineering, Technology and Science (INESC TEC), the European Creative Hubs Network, as well as other Clusters of the Creative Industries such as the Oliva Creative Factory.

The purpose of the workshop was to investigate the innovation capacities of a multi-layered ecosystem that involves Arts, ICT, and innovation when considering two core attributes of the ecosystem: the integrated value chain and the interactive network.