Accessible tourism. Accessible tourism is about making it easy for everyone to enjoy tourism experiences. Making tourism more accessible is not only a social responsibility – there is also a compelling business case for improving accessibility as it can boost the competitiveness of tourism in Europe. Evidence shows that making basic adjustments to a facility, providing accurate information, and understanding the needs of disabled people can result in increased visitor numbers.
Improving the accessibility of tourism services increases their quality and the enjoyment of all tourists. It also improves the quality of life in local communities. Accessible tourism actions The European Commission is committed to increasing accessibility in tourism through a number of actions: Accessible tourism itineraries The EU is co-funding projects related to the design, implementation, and marketing of accessible tourism itineraries.
Eight projects were selected for funding. Studies on accessible tourism Background. Conversations on The Networked Economy. Accessible tourism in Europe. The European Commission - DG Justice and DG Enterprise and Industry – celebrated on 3 and 4 December 2013, the "European Day of Persons with Disabilities" and the "European Tourism Day" 2013 with the Joint Conference on “Accessible Tourism in Europe” The aim of this two-fold event was to raise awareness on the right of everybody to have equal access to tourism services and destinations and to present some success stories and best practices in the field. Tourism is an important source of growth for the economy in Europe, representing today 1.8 million businesses and approximately 9.7 million jobs. However, travelling can still be a real challenge for some people as finding the information on services, checking luggage on a plane, booking an accessible room often prove to be difficult, costly and time consuming.
On 3 December the discussion took a closer look at access and accessibility for tourists and residents from the users' perspective. Ms. Mr. Home page - SME Techweb - Research. Programme for the Competitiveness of enterprises and SMEs (COSME) 2014-2020. Additional tools What is COSME? COSME is the EU programme for the Competitiveness of Enterprises and Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) running from 2014 to 2020 with a planned budget of €2.3bn. COSME will support SMEs in the following area. Regulation establishing COSME 2014-2020 Programme COSME 2015 Work Programme and financing decision (29 October 2014). COSME 2014 Work Programme 1st Revision and financing decision and financing decision 1st revision (22 July 2014). COSME 2014 Support Measures 1st Revision and financing decision 1st revision (08 August 2014).
Third countries' participation in the COSME programme (situation on 03 November 2014) Enterprise Europe Network EASME: The Executive Agency for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (EASME) has been set-up by the European Commission to manage on its behalf several EU programmes including COSME The Participant Portal: Published calls for tender and calls for proposals related to COSME. The Green Economy.
Improving quality of life | Living map of ageing innovators – BETA. Adapting to ageing society demands radical rethink. As we all live longer it is time to put down yesterday's tools, reconsider our assumptions about what it means to be old, and innovate to create new models of living in order to adapt to an ageing society We are all living five hours a day longer. It sounds improbable but these extra hours are real, the catch is that they are being added on to the end of our lives. This figure comes from the work of Professor Tom Kirkwood at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom who has calculated what current lifespan increases are equivalent to on a daily basis.
This is a remarkable fact but it is also an unexpected phenomenon. Demographers have continued to expect life expectancies to plateau, but they have kept on rising. With these increasing lifespans and the 'baby boomers' entering later life, we think it is time to radically rethink assumptions about ageing and what it means to be old. The third is that the mainstream ageing debate tends to focus on a number of single issues. Home - The Young Foundation - A centre for Social Innovation.
Use of Benchmarking to Learn and Improve (UK) Social Enterprise Works was established in 1993 to provide business advice to Social Enterprise’ and promote the development of the sector in the West of England, UK. Social Enterprise Works is a membership organisation and currently has 296 subscribed members; the majority are local social enterprises. The organisation has 9 employees (7.5 FTE), 4 core posts (Director, Finance, Marketing and Admin), 4 Social Enterprise Advisors (2 x general, 2 x Performance Improvement) and a Credit Union Project Officer. Benchmarking is an efficient way to learn from others and improve own organisation The key service is supporting social enterprise start-up including pro-bono legal advice to enable groups to incorporate. More recently the organisation has introduced a wider range of services for established organisations including consultancy and Performance Improvement advice as a partner in the C3 partnership.
Benchmarking is a self-improvement tool for organisations. If you prefer diagrams to words… Public/social/private partnership. Public/social/private partnerships are methods of co-operation between private and government bodies. Background[edit] Models of cooperation between the market and the state: examples from Austria[edit] The name “public social private partnership” (PSPP) is a development of Public Private Partnership (PPP). PPP is one expression of a strong trend towards (re)privatisation, which in some European countries has arisen as a result of more difficult economic conditions in recent years and the associated structural crisis in the public sector (see Eschenbach, Müller, Gabriel: 1993).
The growth in public-private partnerships as a way of fulfilling public tasks in partnership between the state administration and private enterprises must be seen in this context. In political discussions, lack of public funds is often put forward as a limit on state activities. In PPPs, the ownership of the project is shared. From PPP to PSPP[edit] Description[edit] Purposes[edit] Roles and functions[edit] eXchange of Points. Health modernization. Innovation Excellence. We launched Innovation Excellence on August 1, 2011 and so 2012 was our first full year of operations. To celebrate we’ve pulled together the Top 100 Innovation Articles of 2012. Click the link if you missed last year’s Top 100 Innovation Articles of 2011. We do some other rankings too.
At the beginning of each month we will profile the twenty posts from the previous month and we also publish a weekly Top 10 as part of our Innovation Excellence Weekly email and FREE MAGAZINE, so an annual Top 100 seems like a logical fit. Did your favorite make the cut? But enough delay, here are the 100 most popular innovation posts of 2012 (each receiving 5,600 – 34,400 page views): Now, these are the Top 100 innovation articles of 2012 based on the number of page views. If you’re not familiar with Innovation Excellence, we publish 2-6 new articles every day built around innovation and marketing insights from our roster of contributing authors and ad hoc submissions from community members.
Wait! A process enabling you to submit your commitment to be an active partner in the implementation of the Specific Actions of the European Innovation Partnership on Active and Healthy Ageing - Innovation Union. The second Invitation for Commitment to the Action Plans of the European Innovation Partnership on Active and Healthy Ageing closed on 28 February 2013. Around 320 commitments have been submitted. The organisations behind the initiatives cover all Member States of the EU and reach beyond. Some of these submissions were put forward by new coalitions; others are expanding already existing commitments and already existing networks. The 2nd Conference of Partners, held on 25 November 2013 in Brussels, was the opportunity for Action Groups to present their first achievements and impact ( 731 KB) (a year after the adoption of their action plans), as well as delivery targets for 2014/2015.
The initial Invitation for Commitment was launched upon the adoption of the Commission Communication on the EIP's Strategic Implementation Plan (29th February 2012) and closed on 3 June May 2012. Meadow Project | Flexibility and Organisational change - Work Intensification for organisations. Using an outdoor playground for older people to keep fit. Playgrounds for Elders | Veneration Project. By Michael Cohen, Must Have Play. Two years ago, after 21 marvelous years creating playgrounds for children, I happened upon a news report about a playground opening in Manchester, England, designed for older adults. I had never heard of such a thing. Playgrounds for seniors? I was intrigued and needed to know more. Background I learned that this idea has its roots in China, where it combines two cultural norms of holistic health and respect for elders.
The idea spread. The Europeans were next, with playgrounds for aging adults appearing in Austria, England, Finland, Germany, and Scotland. More than an outdoor gym All the designs I found looked like outdoor gyms. Socializing Getting out and meeting people gets more difficult as we age. 90% of elders live at home, and isolation can become a real problem, leading to loneliness and, perhaps, depression. Site selection matters, as does thoughtful landscaping. Playfulness Comments or Inquiries about Playgrounds for Elders or Must Have Play?
Our Playgrounds - Must Have Play - Wellness Playgrounds for Seniors - Ithaca, New York. Quase 2 milhões de idosos a viver maioritariamente sós e no interior. Quase 20% da população residente em Portugal é idosa, revelam os dados definitivos dos Censos 2011, que registaram mais de dois milhões de pessoas com 65 anos ou mais a viver no país, e, muitas delas, sozinhas. Por outro lado, o Instituto Nacional de Estatística (INE) registou também um decréscimo para os 15% da população jovem, sendo que, numa década, se perdeu população em todos os grupos etários até aos 29 anos, e que, no grupo entre os 0 e 14 anos de idade, os valores registados são ligeiramente superior a 1,5 milhões de habitantes. Entre 2001 e 2011 a percentagem de idosos com 65 ou mais anos subiu de 16% para 19%, mas para o grupo populacional dos idosos com 70 ou mais anos o crescimento foi ainda mais acentuado, com um aumento de cerca de 26%. O INE contabilizou 21% de pessoas a viver sozinhas em Portugal, maioria delas idosos, e geralmente no interior do país.
Lusa/SOL. Submission and Registration: IAMO Forum. Degrowth Magazine. Capitalism and Degrowth: An Impossibility Theorem. A slightly different version of this article was published under the title “Degrow or Die?” In the December/January 2011 issue of the UK journal Red Pepper, for which it was originally written. In the opening paragraph to his 2009 book, Storms of My Grandchildren, James Hansen, the world’s foremost scientific authority on global warming, declared: “Planet Earth, creation, the world in which civilization developed, the world with climate patterns that we know and stable shorelines, is in imminent peril….The startling conclusion is that continued exploitation of all fossil fuels on Earth threatens not only the other millions of species on the planet but also the survival of humanity itself—and the timetable is shorter than we thought.”
In making this declaration, however, Hansen was only speaking of a part of the global environmental crisis currently threatening the planet, namely, climate change. Needless to say, none of this would come easily, given today’s capitalist economy. Notes. Why the EU must dare to debate ‘degrowth’ « Feeding the habit. The continuing expansion of the global economy is confusing, but is it also making us poorer?
What if, instead of saying that Europe must get back to growth, European Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso decided to say the opposite? For all of its bluster, the current EU budget battle is being waged over fairly narrow stakes: whether Europe will get back to growth more quickly by spending a little more or a little less at the EU level. The stakes are narrow, firstly because what is spent at EU level is only a fraction of public spending in the 27 member states, and secondly because all of the bickering is focused on how to get growth, and not on whether it is actually necessary or desirable.
Do alternatives to growth really exist? The debate remains on the margins of the public political sphere, but in Europe and elsewhere serious academic theories and grassroots movements are building around the idea of a ‘steady state economy’ with zero growth, or even ‘sustainable degrowth’. WhatisKT - Innovation Development Process. Www.osaka-gu.ac.jp/php/nakagawa/TRIZ/eTRIZ/elinksref/eJapanTRIZ-CB/e2ndTRIZSymp06/eKeynotes06/eLindePaper060726.pdf. The Critical Elements Of Innovation. IdeaFlow: Discussion about innovation and creativity -- new products, strategy, open innovation, commercialization of technologies, patents, idea generation, customer input in the NPD process, more.
« Individual Creativity, Group Innovation? | Main | Collective Creativity In Action » June 12, 2003 The Critical Elements Of Innovation Posted by Joyce Wycoff Renee ... thanks for continuing this conversation. A recent Harvard alert stated that 70% of all business initiatives fail. I think a huge part of this high level of failure is not understanding the underlying principles of all change initiatives. Clay Christensen talked in the same vein recently in a Harvard teleconference about the importance of sound theories. And I'm sure I've gone on too long about this. Comments (0) | Category: › Innovation Of A Tradition › We Hear Them, But Do We Know What They're Saying?
› Farewell from Renee -- but check out the new IdeaFlow blogroll! › Supernova 2007 blog conversation: It's all about innovation and value › Innovation Bloggers Virtual Forum cancelled!!! › Join us at the first-ever Innovation Bloggers Virtual Forum, Thursday, April 26 › Jack’s Notebook: A Business Novel of ‘Deliberate Creativity’ Innovation: The New Face of Quality. For almost 100 years of our quality journey, we increasingly pampered our customers by giving them what they wanted. Customers now assume that quality is a given. Further, in our present information age, customers are more aware of competitive suppliers, as well as suppliers with poor performance.
Quality performance has peaked globally, and the faces of quality have moved from the line worker to the corporate executive. Activities that improve quality hardly yield significant benefits anymore. So what else can be done to improve business performance and delight customers? In the interdependent and competitive global economy one must find true competitive advantages based on features and capability rather than quality alone. Interestingly, innovation has become a global issue and is being addressed by national governments.
Innovation implies the use of intellectual resources--the people and their intellectual involvement, knowledge management, and new product innovations. . • Target. Global Innovation: A Research Project of TIM @ TUHH. [ by Rajnish Tiwari ] Innovation, according to Schumpeter (1934), covers: 1) The introduction of a new good or a new quality of the good 2) The introduction of a new method of production 3) The opening of a new market 4) The conquest of a new source of supply 5) The carrying out of the new organization of an industry The “newness” need not necessarily involve “new” knowledge thereby effectively implying that the “newness” may also concern advancement or modification of existing knowledge. Innovation, according to Rogers (2003), is “an idea, practice, or object that is perceived as new by an individual or other unit of adoption”.
The Oslo Manual, developed jointly by Eurostat and the OECD and currently in its 3rd edition, defines innovation as "the implementation of a new or significantly improved product (good or service), or process, a new marketing method, or a new organisational method in business practices, workplace organisation or external relations. "