Social Innovation and TEchnologies for sustainable growth through participative cultural TOURism (TExTOUR)

Cultural Tourism (CT) plays a crucial role in today’s economies, representing about 37% of the total tourism sector, with an annual growth of around 15%. This role and impact on the economy can be capitalized by certain regions and sites of EU and beyond having a high cultural, social and environmental potential. This impact does not only depend exclusively on the existence of historical-picturesque heritage, but is also related to other synergistic factors such as know-how, ICTs, gastronomy, identity, local culture, values, intangible heritage or other singularities.

TExTOUR mobilizes 18 partners, represented in the quintuple social innovation helix (knowledge, business, society, government and entrepreneurs) to co-design, validate and upscale to various levels, policies and strategies with positive impact on the socio-economic territorial development based on cultural tourism.

TExTOUR uses ICTs and social innovation tools to work with 8 Cultural Tourism Pilots in less known areas to conceive and design collaborative work methodologies for the development of CT strategies for their sites. Each pilot sets up Labs Communities, composed of a wide range of stakeholders with a relevant role in the development of CT sector. The stakeholders are guided through the Cultural Tourism-Labs for the implementation, monitoring and validation of the CT ad hoc strategies. The project develops procedures services and tools and carries out activities, proposed in the methodology. Their results are used to prepare a modular and scalable EU Action Plan for Cultural Tourism Development. In parallel, a technological platform is designed and tested to assess CT policies and strategies envisaged by public and private stakeholders. It provides data analytics as a service, together with a catalogue of relevant services representing the assessed CT strategies, and proper content curation and validation processes, apart from assessing the implemented practices and its related impacts.