IRIS Europe : Innovative Initiatives and strategies for developping digital territories
IRIS stands for Initiatives Régionales, Innovations et Stratégies (Regional Initiatives, Innovations and Strategies).
The overall objective is to aid and accelerate the decision making process of local and regional authorities as far as regional development policies and efficient use of ICT are concerned.
Six public sectors
Six public sectors are addressed by IRIS-Europe : economic development, e-administration, education and learning, tourism and culture, health and social care, infrastructures. These are major sectors contibuting to a sustainable regional development and social cohesion, with better employment, quality of education, modernisation of administrations and good public services…x
The dissemination of good practices, common methodologies and tools will accelerate the development of new services as well as will help to build industrial and service clusters between European regions. It will generate innovation and creativity within the public services while efficiently using ICT.
The activities of IRIS-Europe
To provide “good practice” cases of European ICT projects in order to improve public policy makers’ knowledge and decision ;
To carry out interregional benchmarking and sectorial analyses (cross analysis on the case studies collected : economic development, e-administration, education and learning, tourism and culture, health and social care, infrastructures) in order to highlight the drivers and perspectives in the different fields of regional development ;
To develop and test a Self Assessment / benchmarking tool ;
To organize active dissemination and appropriation of the results towards the actors of regional development through web sites, visits of projects, events and seminars, publications…
With the Self Assessment / benchmarking tool, based on the case studies, regional and sectorial analyses, IRIS-Europe partners aim at developping a new approach for the implementation of regional development ICT projects. This approach will be tested in each partner region and further implemented. The expected results and impacts of IRIS-Europe are a better knowledge of ICT opportunities for regional development, an easier assessment of ICT projects, the creation of new observatories / resource centres and new joint projects between European regions.
The operation will provide action plans which will guide the drafting of regional sustainable policies using the capabilities of ICT. Concrete initiatives of new projects will concern, for example, implementation of an inter-regional project of e-learning for small companies, mutualisation of contents for multimedia public centres, the transfer of “packaged experience” for tourism sector.
