Sustainable Tourism Innovation Cluster
A major focus for The Mediterranean Community is developing sustainable tourism, a major and vital commercial sector in the Mediterranean Sea region, mainly due to the areas history, culture and natural environment. Currently, apart from cruse ships - island hopping, the vast potential of the ancient ports and harbours surrounding the Mediterranean, together with the significance of their history and culture, have been largely neglected. Twelve corporate members of the Mediterranean Community are currently engaged in the Mediterranean Community Innovation Cluster on Sustainable Tourism: developing and exploiting business innovations in maritime tourism, capitalising on the motifs “Ancient Mediterranean Ports” and “Maritime Silk Road”, offering tourism facilities and recreational, creative and cultural activities within the framework of sustainable tourism initiatives.
The membership of the Mediterranean Community’s Sustainable Tourism Innovation cluster comprises Innovative start-ups, and Small and Medium Enterprises, as well as research and knowledge dissemination organisations and not-for-profit organisations. The Cluster is designed to stimulate innovative activity by promoting sharing of facilities and exchange of knowledge and expertise and by contributing effectively to knowledge transfer, networking, information dissemination and collaboration among its members.
The Mediterranean Community is well equipped to support, facilitate, and develop the Sustainable Tourism Innovation Cluster providing access to relevant intangible resources and Intellectual Capital. The extensive historical, cultural and navigational resources assembled through the work of The Mediterranean Community Core group for more than a decade are organised within a MetaOpticon multimedia resource repository. The members of the Sustainable Tourism Innovation Cluster will have free access to MetaOpticon and will be entitled to use this multimedia content free of charge in their own corporate product and service and advertising publications under Creative Commons Type 3 licence – with attribution to the Mediterranean Community.
This will, for example, enable a synthesis of multimedia products that will help SMEs in the field of Sustainable Tourism to collaborate on development and operation of innovative tours and related activities in local areas centred on ancient Mediterranean ports. Here, the multimedia products generated by the Mediterranean Community and disseminated on a variety of platforms (brochures, DVDs, mobile phone apps, targeted websites) ‘shows and tells’ about the local area’s ecology, and culture, both historically, and currently, in ways that stimulate marine tourists to explore ashore and use local families (accommodation, restaurants guided tours, activities (theatre performances, participatory video etc.). In this way, maritime tourists will be encouraged to explore and participate further in local facilities and activities.