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Innovation and Capacity Building in Higher Education for Cultural Management, Hospitality and Sustainable Tourism in European Cultural Routes
Start date: Sep 1, 2015, End date: Aug 31, 2017 PROJECT  FINISHED 

CULTOUR+ is a Strategic Partnership of universities, local governments, SMEs and NGOs, that following the mainlines of the Higher Education Modernisation Agenda, will offer high quality and innovative tools and courses based in innovation, international mobility and cross-border cooperation to enhance capacity building in higher education curricula in the fields of cultural tourism and hospitality, cultural management and shared cultural heritage. Based on the results of the study “Impact of European Cultural Routes on SMEs’ innovation and competitiveness", CULTOUR+ aims to promote entrepreneurship in Higher Education, making Entrepreneurship Education a basic feature in related curricula, disseminating best practices and fostering projects for creating employment opportunities for graduates in knowledge-intensive jobs in the cultural management and tourism and hospitality sectors. As well as SME generation, networking, co-working and clustering, CULTOUR+ will promote intercultural dialogue and other transversal skills, specially, creativity, entrepreneurship, cooperation and global awareness. CULTOUR+ will be centered, in a first phase, in two of the European Cultural Routes most important thematics for participant countries and regions: pilgrimage and religious tourism management and thermal historic towns and sites. Based on the European Cultural Route “The Santiago de Compostela Pilgrim Routes”, as a transnational model of inspiration,imitation and transformation, CULTOUR+ will connect expertise in cultural heritage and tourism management to a selected number of significant religious routes and centers´ case studies from the participant countries. CULTOUR+ will establish links with different levels of authority – local, national and European – financial and governmental institutions, tourist organisations, and other bodies that would encourage future development of the routes and sites. It will also provide insights on and contribute to SMEs’ performance, innovation capacity, and network and cluster development in the partner countries cultural religious routes and sites. Chaves and Sao Pedro do Sul in Portugal will be the inspiring models of thermal tourism management, another strategic area for most of the participant partners regions and organizations. The project will center in coaching a small number of selected business plans and projects (two for each participant country), taking the twelve projects as real life examples and models through the training program, aiming to take them as far as possible in their first starting-up phase. This way, expertise and learning will be highly concentrated in a reduced number of projects selected by their innovation and originality, but moreover, by their sustainability and employment creation capacity. As models of entrepreneurial integration of the triangle knowledge, spin-offs will be encouraged by the Strategic Partnership. As a project being part of a new generation of European collaborative partnerships, it is regarded an obligation to not only offer innovation in the subject fields addressed, but also in an important activity such as dissemination of results. Especially because such innovation brings the project in flow with 21st century reality in Europe and with emerging work forms and collaborative practice.

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