Startup Europe Awards

Sustainable and digital tourism comes to Transfiere with a FU-TOURISM WORKSHOP

  • The event is part of the European project FU-TOURISM, funded with 4 million euros, in which Finnova is a partner.
  • The Finnova Foundation is organising this workshop as a side event at Transfiere on Thursday 21 March from 11.30am to 1.30pm.
  • This workshop is part of the Startup Europe Week SEW, an initiative in which Finnova participates as co-organiser.

The Transfiere Forum, which will be held in FYCMA from 20 to 22 March, will host the event “FU-TOURISM STAKEHOLDER WORKSHOP: €4M for Sustainable Innovation and Green Entrepreneurship in the Spanish tourism ecosystem” on Thursday 21 March from 11:30 to 13:30. Organised by the Finnova Foundation, the event is part of the European project FU-TOURISM and will bring together experts and stakeholders from the Spanish tourism sector to address the future of a sector in the midst of a race towards innovation, and the double green and digital transition.

The workshop aims to explore the potential and challenges of the Spanish tourism sector, sharing best practices focused on sustainability and digitisation of the ecosystem. It will be a hybrid webinar, broadcast from the TRANSFIERE fair in FYCMA, Malaga, with the participation of speakers and attendees in person and online.  Speakers will share their projects and best practices on digitalisation and/or sustainability in tourism, highlighting the potentials and challenges they face. The presentations will be followed by a round table that will allow all the speakers to generate a dialogue on the challenges of sustainability and digitisation from different tourism sectors.

This event is also part of Startup Europe Week (SEW), an initiative in which Finnova participates as co-organiser, which is present in more than 300 cities in almost 50 countries and is the largest regional entrepreneurship event in the world. 

Support ecosystem for tourism SMEs

The workshop is part of the European project FU-TOURISM, which supports European tourism SMEs in their transition towards a green, digital and inclusive economy, with a focus on the application of the principles of the regenerative economy.

Funded with €4 million by the COSME programme and with a duration of 36 months (2023-2026), the European project FU-TOURISM is led by EUPOLIS Group and integrated by a partnership of eight entities from Croatia, Belgium, Spain, Greece, Austria, Poland and Italy.

The Finnova Foundation, partner of the project, leads the transferability, replication and communication of the project at European level, taking into account the innovation processes implemented through Startup Europe Awards (SEUA), a methodology promoted by Startup Europe and with the institutional support of the European Commission.

The SEUAs are a tool for identifying disruptive SMEs and startups that promotes public-private collaboration and raises awareness of the importance of self-entrepreneurship as a driver of employment. It also generates alliances that help to meet the United Nations SDGs and the actions of the European Green Pact, thus contributing to the challenges of the tourism sector. FU-TOURISM will develop a support ecosystem for tourism SMEs, promoting greater cooperation in innovation between these companies and the sector’s incubators and accelerators. To this end, it will launch an acceleration programme that will identify and support a total of 102 tourism SMEs from the six European countries that are part of the project through support services for sustainability, digitalisation, inclusive business models and direct financial support. During the acceleration programme, 10 SMEs from each country will be selected in a transparent and open way to receive a 5-month support and a grant of 20,000 euros each. In addition, the Scaling Up programme will select 42 SME consortia (7 per country) to receive a grant of €30,000 each and related business support.

“One of the objectives of the programme is to try to ensure that the accelerated SMEs can access European funds through programmes such as Interreg, LIFE, Digital Europe and Horizon so that their project can count on additional funding of up to 2 million euros through these programmes”, says Juan Manuel Revuelta, CEO of Finnova, from Brussels. Revuelta also recalls that TRANSFIERE, in Malaga, “is an ideal place to identify DMOs and technology transfer entities that can join the project as partners or participants and include the know-how of this project”. “There are many European funds available at the moment and you just have to know how to use them and present a project in due time and form,” he concludes.

TOURISM SME TRANSITION LIVING LABS

One of the key pillars of the FU-TOURISM project is the development of a platform and network of collaborative 4-Helix Clusters, known as Tourism SME Transition Living Labs. These clusters will enable SMEs to be placed at the heart of the tourism ecosystem, adopting a multi-stakeholder approach that takes into account the wider needs of the destination, visitors and local citizens. “This objective of living labs is strategic as it seeks to generate local actions that can be replicated and have an impact at European and global level,” Revuelta stresses.

For more information, please contact

Manuela Granada – Finnova’s Communication Department

manuela.granada@finnova.eu