St3er

ST3ER (Scaling Twin Transition in Tourism by harnessing the Experience Economy for greater Resilience) supports tourism and creative SMEs in developing digital and green innovation projects in 5 countries and strengthens their capacity to become more resilient and sustainable. Údarás na Gaeltachta is lead partner and coordinator for the ST3ER project, which has 5 other partners from five countries: WestBIC (Ireland), CEEI Báhia de Cádiz (Spain), Science and Technology Park of University of Porto (Portugal), Razvojni Center SRCA Slovenije (Slovenia) and Creative Business Network (Denmark). The 3-year project is coordinated by Údarás na Gaeltachta and co-funded by the European Union following a competitive call by the European Innovation Council and SMEs Executive Agency (EISMEA). This call for proposals was part of the overall COVID-19 recovery strategy for a sustainable tourism ecosystem and in particular aims at equipping and empowering SMEs in their twin transition efforts in line with the Tourism Transition Pathway. The action aims to guide the forward-looking recovery of the tourism ecosystem by providing support to the digital and green transformation of tourism companies, particularly SMEs, and boosting innovation, resilience, sustainability, and quality along the tourism value chain. The project aims to enhance the competitiveness of tourism SMEs and facilitate their green and digital transition through capacity building of tourism SMEs, fostering innovative solutions for sustainable tourism, delivering a 6-month accelerator with a focus of scaling SMEs, and promoting best practice exchanges, knowledge sharing and transfer. The total project budget is €3.2 million and will provide cascade funding of €1.96m directly to SMEs in support of 72 innovation projects, over 2 open calls and 3 themes/financing categories. Further information is available at