About the project
Recent research activities in the ICT area, in particular in digital content and media sectors, has resulted in a number of technological enablers which allow the creation of new products and services. This has established a new converged social media environment in Europe as a playground for a large number of stakeholders, to ultimately enable creation of the related business, new jobs, and revenues benefiting from these developments. However, the main drivers of the new media and content technologies are the big industries, whereas the main users of these technologies are small enterprises / SMEs, which are creating product and services to reach the end customers – European and world-wide citizens. We can still observe a gap in discussions between the large technology providers and the small technology adopters, preventing the establishment of common strategies for the technology take up towards a more efficient creation of the new innovative product and services. Therefore, there is a clear need for the establishment of a common European community in the area of convergence and social media, in order to lay-down common research and innovation strategies, by involving important players from academia and research institutions, policy makers, end users, etc.
Accordingly, one of the main goals of the VITAL MEDIA project is to enlarge the community in the social media area at the European level, at level of the national and regional clusters, through collaboration amongst the NEM Initiative and the clusters. The enlarged community will be animated through a number of discussions at workshops to be organised at all mentioned levels and through cooperation within an innovative online collaboration tool, aiming to widely discuss and establish research and innovations roadmaps for the area, by strong cooperation with research and academic institutions active in the area, covering the identified gaps between the technology providers, their users/ adopters, and research.
In line with the main project goals, the VITAL MEDIA specific objectives are defined as follows:
– To consolidate a visible and sound community across Europe for the Convergence and Social Media industry, building on existing European platforms and networks, such as the NEM Initiative, European Creative Industry Alliance and cluster networks and enlarging the scope to less represented areas, where the development of new clusters will be encouraged and supported.
– To connect, or set up where necessary, an optimal combination of online and physical collaboration tools (web based platform, social media, events, etc.) to support networking among all relevant players, conducive to establishing working groups on specific issues and challenges.
– To define the Convergence and Social Media Strategic Innovation and Research Agenda in order to align a common strategic vision and roadmap shared by all relevant players from the industry, academia, research and policy spheres.
– To ensure wide dissemination of all initiatives and activities carried out by the community via the platform, social media, events, working groups, workshops, publications, whitepapers, brochures, posters and videos where appropriate, to all relevant audiences at European, national and regional level, taking advantage of clusters pan-regional connections.
To be up-to-date with the ongoing VITAL MEDIA project activities, please, consult the NEM Initiative website (link).
