Euro Digital Cluster
Expression of Interest
We are representing a group of European Clusters with a common intent to form a European Strategic Cluster Partnership (ESCP) with smart specialization in Digital Transformation/Industry 4.0 and Creative Industries.
Title of the prospective partnership
Our new partnership will be named Euro Digital Cluster and will be accessible at http://www.eurodigitalcluster.eu.
Target sectors, technology fields and smart specialisation priority areas
EuroDigitalCluster will gather established European clusters with complimentary expertise around the challenge of digital transformation. Together they will be to promote creative industries and especially new media as significant technology enablers to serve future innovative services from other industries such as Transport, eHealth, Energy, Mobility, and Factories of the Future.
Clusters already associated to the partnering
- TWIST (Belgium)
TWIST is a media cluster that works to strengthen innovation and growth within Southern Belgian media industries. It is the main business cluster acting in the sector of digital audiovisual and multimedia technologies in Belgium. TWIST is mainly active on three markets: Cinema, TV, Animation; Broadcast (development of technologies and facilities); Immersive and interactive industry (dedicated to the cultural and creative industry and related industrial SMEs and larger companies).
Pierre Collin – www.twist-cluster.com - p.collin@twist-cluster.com
- Cap Digital (France)
Created in 2006, Cap Digital is the biggest cluster for digital transformation in Europe, trusted by over 1000+ members: 850+ innovative SMEs, 60+ major corporations, 80+ institutions of higher education and 14 capital investors. Cap Digital aims at promoting the Paris Region as one of the world leaders in digital contents, creative industries and services, from an industrial as well as a strategic point of view. Fostering R&D, helping companies to expand, networking its members and showcasing them throughout the world, are some of the activities Cap Digital undertakes to support the creativity and competitiveness of this important sector. Every year, Cap Digital organizes “Futur en Seine”, the digital world festival. In 2016, they created EdFab, a dedicated place to promote innovation in the strategic fields of training, education and business transformation services.
Josephine Rohner - www.capdigital.com - josephine.rohner@capdigital.com
- Pôle Media Grand Paris (France)
Created in 2002, Pole Media Grand Paris federates the actors of the audiovisual and film industry for the economic development of the sector in Paris Region. Its collaborative network regroups a hundred of structures: companies; local authorities; academic institutions; training organizations. The overall representing 8200 jobs and 2.4 billion € in turnover.
All the Digital Media activities are represented in the cluster, related to technical and computer services, as well as initial or continuing training in the sector. Pole Media Grand Paris was named "Cluster of Enterprises" in 2011.
Its mission is to animate its collaborative network around a new economic dynamic, based on innovation, training, employment, international development and social responsibility.
Its sectors of activity: Cinema, television, CGI animation, transmedia, augmented and virtual reality, digital archiving, training, research.
Its markets: Cinema, TV, advertising, transmedia, corporate communication, web, video game.
Lydie Fenech - www.lepole.org - lydie.fenech@lepole.org
- Media Evolution (Sweden)
Media Evolution is a cluster and a member organization that enables organizations and individuals to share, learn, think in new ways and adapt together in the age of digital transformation. To achieve that, Media Evolution manages projects and offers services within its community, to foster competence and internal and external collaboration, including with international partners.
Sara Ponnert - www.mediaevolution.se - sara@mediaevolution.se
- Barcelona Media Alliance (Spain)
Barcelona Media Alliance is an initiative promoted by Eurecat together with Cluster Audiovisual de Catalunya, Enciclopèdia Catalana and Acceso Group. It was created in December 2015, taking over the activities of Barcelona Media Cluster which dissolved when the promoter, Barcelona Media Technological Centre, became part of Eurecat.
Its objectives are to promote the cooperation among cultural and creative companies and entities in order to strengthen innovation, to carry out activities that help identifying R&D projects that contribute to raise the competitiveness of the sector, to develop and to manage partnership projects that help partners to improve their innovation level, to cooperate with public institutions at national and international levels.
Santi Fort - www.eurecat.org - santi.fort@eurecat.org
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MediaNetwork Bavaria and Transmedia Bayern e.V. (Germany)
The MediaNetwork Bavaria serves as the media cluster in Bavaria. It is an umbrella organization for the mediasector in bavaria. It is based in Munich and part of the Bavarian regulatory authority for new media. The MediaNetwork Bavaria collaborates with a lot of other institutions and industries to initiate and organize workshops, networking- and roundtable and big events. It is also an important player in Bavaria to push innovations and new media technologies e.g. Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality.
Transmedia Bayern e.V. is an interdisciplinary network for media professionals. It connects filmmakers, authors, journalists, game producers, designers, coders, social media experts, artists and musicians. It also runs media innovation conferences, workshops and labs. Transmedia Bayern’s goal is to foster innovation in the fields of storytelling, to research new business models for multiplatform media properties, to develop interdisciplinary methods for digital content creation and to connect to other creative networks in Germany and abroad.
Aline-Florence Buttkereit, B. A. - www.mediennetzwerk.bayern - af.buttkereit@mediennetzwerk.bayern
Egbert van Wyngaarden - http://www.transmedia-bayern.org/ - info@transmedia-bayern.org
- Madrid Network ICT Audiovisual Cluster (Spain)
Madrid Network consists of over 700 partners including large and small companies, research centers and universities, grouped into 12 clusters and five technology parks in order to generate business and seek new opportunities through innovation. The ICT Cluster Audiovisual of Madrid is a business association declared nonprofit association (AEI) level of excellence by the Ministry of Industry and Tourism. It aims to:
- Promoting innovation and competitiveness of its members, promoting the generation, retention and sharing of talent and knowledge.
- Promoting business models that encourage the search for new audiovisual content.
- Contribute to the development of R&D and innovationi in all fields related to the visual.
All their activity is based on the collaboration among industry players to create added value and the belief that we live in a increasingly visual world.
Madrid Network - www.madridnetwork.org - veronica.buey@ madridnetwork.org
- Imaginove (France)
The Imaginove competitive cluster federates and contributes to the expansion of projects and businesses belonging to the digital content industry in the French Rhône-Alpes region. It stimulate the region’s dynamics and boost its national and global renown.
1,200 businesses, 25 research labs, 28 training modules related to images, as well as top-flight international events such as the Annecy Animation Film Festival and Market, the Serious Game Expo, Innorobo, and more. Imaginove supports Rhône-Alpes’ companies in three competitive domains (R&D, Commercial and International, Training) via concrete assistance measures.
The number of cooperative label-bearing R&D projects has grown exponentially over the past 3 or 4 years (average of 40/year). Meanwhile, the cluster has succeeded in developing numerous innovative practices, as noted by assessors in January 2012, covering: training, global expansion and emergence of innovative projects which combine creation of content, usages and technologies, networking, and collective action programs.
Imaginove - www.imaginove.fr - vovcharenko@imaginove.fr
- CATS (France)
The CATS (Cluster Aquitain of Transmedia Storytelling) brings together professionals from cinema, audiovisual, animation, video games, internet and multimedia industry. The activity contributes to the dynamism of the Nouvelle Aquitaine Region and to its national and international influence.
Our missions are based on the following points: facilitation meetings between professionals, provide adapted training, facilitating project funding, promoting our members' projects, promote research and reflection on new forms of digital experiments, encourage inter-cluster collaboration, a business accelerator and collaborate with parner associations already active.
CATS – www.le-cats.fr – a.hacquin@le-cats.fr
- Gi-Cluster (Greece)
The gi-Cluster (Gaming and Creative Technologies & Applications Cluster) was established with the mission to become a fully functional innovation and business ecosystem with substantial international market share.
Today, all of its participating members aspire to become, not only a collection of similar -either complementing or competing- businesses but an amalgam of commercial activity and business infrastructure that can develop superior value for all, by exploiting the focused benefits and structured guidance offered within the ecosystem. In that respect, the participants in the gi-Cluster seek to form ties and linkages beyond those of a traditional business network, i.e. not just co-operating on joint development projects, complementing each other, overcoming common problems and achieving collective efficiency, but exploiting the full potential of clustering as a powerful framework for meeting the set strategic targets towards achieving regional economic development.
Corallia Gi-cluster - www.corallia.org - j.phoca@ corallia.org
Vision
Based on their previous collaborations in EU funded projects such as Eurotransmedia, NEM initiative, NEM Club of Clusters, and several co-organized events, EuroDigitalCluster will go beyond and set a specific set of activities based on the conclusions of the Eurotransmedia project conclusions.
Eurotransmedia conducted an extensive survey of the new media state of the art and future needs who led to three key documents co-signed by all its partners:
- The Eurotransmedia Vision 2030 and Beyond
- The Eurotransmedia Strategic Agenda 2015
- The Eurotransmedia White Paper 2016
The Vision Document describes the possible media industry evolution in the 15 coming years and highlights the various artistic, technological, and business challenges it will face.
The Strategic Agenda identify areas in need of more research and innovation investment in order to reach the objectives described in the Vision Document. The 24 identified challenges are deduced from an extensive SWOT analysis and feedback from many media industry stakeholders. Those bottlenecks were organised around three axes: artistic, technological, and business.
The White Paper highlights actions to take advantage of the opportunities and overcome the current challenges towards the implementation of the transmedia / new media approach and help to the development of the European creative industries.
All three documents are freely accessible on both Eurotransmedia.eu/library and on www.eurodigitalcluster.eu web sites.
Objectives and ambitions
As all clusters members of our consortium are pursuing the same goals to improve business and employment in the new media sector in their own geographic area, the ambitions of the consortium are mainly oriented toward increasing international and interregional cooperation. We firmly believe that each European region has its strong points and can improve and build on them through a better understanding of their respective vision of the three-development axis highlighted in our White Paper:
- Redefining the new media industrial working chain from the idea to the final consumer while including “user in the loop”,
- Cross fertilization with other industries,
- Inventing and refining the new business models.
To address that series of challenges and to benefit from all the opportunities offered by our members, we will propose actions shared by the EurodigitalCluster members. In order to maximize their outcome, these actions will be open to external stakeholders when appropriate.
EurodigitalCluster will improve on existing on-going activities and initiatives launched by its members and other stakeholders. Those actions intend to help the involved regions to tackle the three challenge categories highlighted in the Vision document: technological, business related, and cultural/artistic challenges. The list of actions here under is non exhaustive.
1. New Media as technological enabler
- Goal: Engaging digital transformation via new media solutions in varied industries (Heath, Transport, Factories 4.0…)
- Promotion activities: Business-to-business pitching and demonstration event(s), Hackathon, Open innovation media-related European competition.
- New Media as a driver for the creation of new market opportunities
- Goal: Support the emergence of projects, stimulate cross collaboration between different industry players, support entrepreneurs in developing new sustainable business models.
- Coaching activities: Coaching for project holders & entrepreneurs, IP helpdesk, watch of the European and International financing incentives, raising awareness in the financing tools for R&D projects and in SME-specific financing tools.
- Visibility Boost: attendance at major events, mapping of relevant stakeholders, networking & matchmaking with investors, promotion and showcase of success stories.
Several relevant events are already identified, such as “Annecy Animation Film Festival”, “Serious Game Expo”, “Innorobo”, "Cross Video Days" (France, http://crossvideodays.com/en)“Futur en Seine” (France, www.futur-en-seine.paris)” and “The Conference” (Sweden, www.2017.theconference.se), the last two being full week events with international-matchmaking, pitching, and demo sessions.
2. New Media & the next generation of professionals
- Goal: Support the training of the next generation of professionals, entrepreneurs, and investors.
- Training activities: Creation of a new media master.
- Connection with relevant initiatives:
- Mapping & promotion of Fab labs and Creative labs (and their tools).
- Mapping and documenting new business and funding models such as crowdfunding, equity crowd funding, blockchain currency (Bitcoin) use, location-based adhoc user groups, etc.
Added Value
Assembling several European regions innovation focus actors will generate a far greater number of positives than what a simple addition let expect. Inviting around the table a vast number of region-specific skills will foster creativity and competitiveness of industries emerging from the digital revolution. With several thousand affiliated companies – most of them innovative SMEs–, our consortium will be an invaluable asset for the creative industries-induced transition to digital in Europe.
The consortium expects to see the birth of many new business models, dozens of new businesses, joint-ventures, and startups as results of its actions.
Governance
Coordinating partner: The Belgian TWIST cluster will coordinate the activities. The experience and management ability of TWIST were confirmed with its successful coordination of the Eurotransmedia project recently achieved. Modern communication tools such as VPN, videoconference, shared document repositories, and social networks private groups will ensure constant and sustained communication between partners. If required, same-location responsible persons meetings will be held at the co-organized events.
Full partners: All the associate partners cited here above will contribute to most of the planned actions, and each of them is leading and promoting at least one action.
Networked partners: External European and non-European partners will be invited to participate to selected actions and exchange information with the consortium when appropriate.
Should you have any questions, please contact me at the phone number or email listed above.
Sincerely,
P.Collin
Pierre Collin, on behalf of TWIST, Cap Digital, Pôle Media Grand Paris, Media Evolution, Barcelona Media Alliance, Transmedia Bavaria, Madrid Network, Imaginove, Cluster Aquitain of Transmedia Storytelling and gi-Cluster.