ACTIVE ID

Sports & leisure (S&L) is a broad industry encompassing such sectors as sports, tourism, and recreation. It has a promise of creating a wide societal and economic impact by improving citizens’ well-being and EU regions’ vitality. To be able to do so in full force, the S&L industry needs to adapt to the structural and behavioural changes brought about by Covid-19 and climate change. This requires embracing strong orientation for cross-sectoral innovation, supported by data-driven approach and sustainability principles, as well as creating enabling environments for S&L SMEs to adopt the innovation mindset.

While developing S&L sectors is often considered as one of the core priorities in regional development, regional policy frameworks often lack a coherent vision of how the interlinkage of these sectors can be turned into a driving force of regional economies. To address this, ACTIVE ID offers an integrated approach to facilitating the growth of regional S&L industries, allowing the regions to build on the priorities set in their regional S3s. Specifically, the project aims at providing holistic support to S&L SMEs by strengthening regional S&L innovation ecosystems, enhancing the measures for boosting S&L SME innovation capacities, and facilitating S&L SME digital & green upskilling to ensure their competitiveness and adaptability.

ACTIVE ID consortium covers 5 EU regions of varying levels of regional development and state of S&L industries: Päijät-Häme (FI), Castilla-La Mancha (ES), Dalarna (SE), North Brabant (NL), Vratsa (BG). Building on the joint interregional learning process, ACTIVE ID PPs will improve 5 regional policy instruments that have potential to promote S&L cross-sectoral multi-stakeholder innovation in their regions and upgrade S&L SME support mechanisms. This process will be supported via intensive thematic learning, entailing PPs’ participation in study visits, deep-dive sessions, masterclasses, and peer-reviewing.