From March 7 to 9, 2022, the partnership of the Interreg North Sea Region project Futures By Design met for a hybrid event in Antwerp to exchange information on the project results to date and future activities in the individual regions.
The biannual meeting was hosted by the Belgian companies Open Manufacturing Campus and BLENDERS, which are based in the Flanders region. For this reason, the focus was particularly on the project implementation with small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) there and stakeholders from the region reported on how their involvement in the project helped them to discover new digitalization opportunities for their companies. The tools provided as part of the project show them opportunities to engage with the topic and integrate new, digital solutions into their day-to-day work. The companies select the tools that make sense for them from the various tools and benefit from using them, for example by improving their contact with customers, tapping into new target groups or simplifying processes. In this way, Futures By Design helps them to innovate and generate better sales with less effort. Arne Van Laer (Chamber of Commerce) and Geert Krekel (Freelance Project Manager at BLENDERS) presented how companies can benefit from digitalization and the analysis of internal and external data and also discussed the pitfalls and obstacles that need to be avoided or overcome in order to successfully implement innovations, even in smaller companies.
Later in the meeting, the 12 project partners from Sweden, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Belgium and Germany reported on the current status of their cooperation with the respective SMEs. By the end of June 2022, 180 projects will have been created. The projects will be implemented in the participating SMEs based on their specific needs and with support from the individual partners of the Future by Design project. For example, CRM systems will be introduced in the companies or booking systems will be implemented, the importance of which has now also become relevant for small companies in the course of the developments of the last two years, which would otherwise only be able to carry out their contact data collection duties with immense effort. The projects also focus on improving visibility in the online world: By selecting the right social media channels for the company and using them more and more with moving images and well-targeted content, existing customer relationships can be strengthened and new target groups acquired.
The tools developed in the project partnership continue to play a central role. A glossary of data terminology for SMEs with important terms such as big data, clustering, data mining and web scraping has already been published by a project partner this year. In addition to the tools, the online hub https://futuresbydesign.net/ also provides further resources for SMEs, such as so-called “Horizon Scanning Papers”, which report on future-relevant topics such as IoT, digital currency, drones and virtual/augmented reality.
The Steering Committee Meeting concluded the partner meeting. The next partner meeting is planned for the end of June 2022 in Halland, Sweden, and will be organized by the Alexanderson Institute, which is responsible for communication management together with aconium GmbH as part of Futures By Design. The project partners hope to meet on site for the first time since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic to plan the final steps of the project.