Representatives from Rinova joined partners from Spain, Italy, Greece, Poland and Slovakia for a 2-day event last week to launch our new 3-year initiative ‘Bridging the Gap’ at Polo Digital in Malaga, Spain.
Rinova has had a base in Malaga at Polo Digital since July 2017, where we are offering internationalisation advice and business support to digital content start-ups. Polo Digital is the largest digital content hub in Spain, offering a unique digital space for aspiring entrepreneurs and start-ups through co-working, creative innovation and advanced training.
So when the opportunity came to invite Polo Digital’s parent organisation, Promalaga, to be a partner in a new Erasmus+ application that we were developing, we jumped at the chance!
We were therefore delighted when we heard over the summer that our project Bridging the Gap had been approved and we finally got started when Promalaga hosted the launch of Bridging the Gap at Polo Digital in Malaga on the 8th and 9th November.
Pictured right: Members of the Rinova team with the Bridging the Gap partners at the launch meeting at Polo Digital on the 8th November.
The project is financed by the European Union’s Erasmus+ Key Action 2 programme and is co-ordinated and led by Rinova. It addresses how the enterprise skills that creative young people need to enter and thrive in the labour market of Europe’s fast-growing creative economy can be developed in combination by coaches and advisers – who need to be able to bring together contemporary business know-how, in-depth knowledge of the creative sector and mentoring and coaching young people to maximise their impact.
Bridging the Gap builds on a number of initiatives that clusters of the partners have worked together on at different times in recent years, to support access to and the development of the cultural and creative industries in Europe. Central amongst these at the European level were the European Cultural Learning Network (ECLN), an 11-country Lifelong Learnning Programme network project that explored the validation of non-formal learning in the cultural industries. Furthmore, with a specific focus on entrepreneurship and artists, the Erasmus+ project Break in the Desk, led by our partner Materahub has succeeded in building an ever-widening network of initiatives and stakeholders in this field, to which we are delighted add Bridging the Gap as part of its ‘family’.
Pictured right, above: Rinova’s Founder and Director, Rick Parkes, leading the opening session at the project launch.
Rinova has also delivered business advice to creative businesses and start-ups in locally-funded initiatives in both Matera, Italy and Larissa, Greece in recent years as well as the work we are now doing with digital content creatives in Malaga.
We are taking this agenda forward with our partners Materahub (Italy), Dimitra (Greece), Arteria (Poland) and RDA Senec-Pezinok (Slovakia) – all of whom we have worked with in relevant projects – as well as our colleagues at Promalaga via Polo Digital.
You can already follow the progress of Bridging the Gap on Twitter @bridging_tGap.
STOP PRESS AND UPDATE JANUARY 2019: We have launched a project website – see here !
There will be opportunites for advisers who are interested to get directly involved in the project, so if you would like to know more contact Trevor Burgess of Rinova at t.burgess@rinova.co.uk
Pictured above: The Bridging the Gap partners are joined for a team photo with the Mayor of Malaga, Francisco de la Torre.
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