INDESCAT hosted the official kick-off meeting of the SmartSports4GoodLife project in Barcelona with promising outlooks.

The project, which is funded by the European Commission COSME program, focuses on the need to jointly face the European sports industry challenges for the next years (digitalisation, sustainability, etc.) by strengthening the management capacities and skills of Clusters as a tool to provide add-value services and transfer knowledge to their members, especially SMEs. The cross-sectoral dimension of the Sports Industry requires the establishment of a permanent collaboration with Clusters from other sectors (textile, technological, tourism, etc).

The five partners involved have been selected based on their working complementarities as well as on their previous collaboration initiatives in different European projects such as as EU4SportsClusters Alliance, ClusSport or Inno4Sports. In this sense, Sports and Technology is more linked to Innovation and Technology in the Brainport region (the Netherlands), the active and sustainable tourism is promoted by Cluster Montagne in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region (France), INDESCAT is focused on improving competitiveness amongst companies in the Catalonian region, and health and vitality are more promoted by MSE Cluster in the city of Debrecen (Hungary). Those complementarities match perfectly with the sports industry challenges as a cross-sectoral industry, all of them under the umbrella of EPSI, the European Platform for Sport Innovation representing in Europe the entire sport ecosystem.

“We are very happy to have launched this new project” says Oriol Serra, cluster manager of INDESCAT, “as a continuation from the 2 previous ones, also supported by the European COSME program”. “Our fundamental aim is to learn from each other, exchange best practices and ultimately bring tangible added values to our member SME-companies” concludes Oriol Serra.