Inno4Sports

Inno4Sports places itself in the context of socio economic transformations in Europe that open up new dimensions for the capitalisation of sports ecosystems. The potentials of Sport ecosystems have started to be been recognized at EU level as drivers for innovation and growth with a high potential for cross-sectoral spill-overs and interlinkages with various societal and economic fields. Still, at regional levels, they remain underdeveloped, due to existing inconsistencies and an underrepresentation of the potentials created by sports innovation within RIS3 and regional development programmes. Inno4Sports brings together five regions that all share the ambition to address a common objective, namely to improve the performance and efficiency of development programmes that are able to support sports clusterisation processes based on quadruple helix cooperation, and by doing so, promote the innovative value chains of sports. Taking into account the different regional contexts (e.g. development levels, available expertise on clusterisation processes), specific points to address have been identified by focussing on 4 thematic sub objectives; the creation of opportunities for market access, the exploration of cross-over cooperation, the development of harmonisation processes with regional development programmes and the creation of interlinkages with consumer needs and societal trends. By deepening cluster integration, through an intensive process of interregional learning, knowledge exchange and lasting inter-cluster cooperation processes, all partners set out to reach their ambitions. As a new initiative, Inno4Sports, targets a topic that has not yet been tackled before in such concreteness. With the inclusion of EPSI as Advisory Partner to the project, a strong dissemination platform is included that will bring the project’s findings closer to the attention of not only regional, national, but also EU level policy makers to generate a multitude of future spin-offs.