Collaborative consumption is booming and brings great potential for companies. With this economic model, accessing goods and services is more important than owning them exclusively. Faced with this new reality, the European Commission in 2017 convened the Opportunities for European entrepreneurs in the sharing economy program with the aim of identifying existing collaborative platforms and helping small and medium-sized companies to explore the potential of the collaborative economy, responding to a European legal framework.
Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (Italy), the Chamber of Commerce of Mallorca (Spain), Gis-Transfercenter Foundation (Bulgaria) and INESC TEC Insituto De Engehharia de Sistemas e Computadores, Technology and Science (Portugal) was presented to this call in a consortium with the project TouriSMEshare, which was one of the five selected by the European Commission to carry out this analysis of the situation within two years.
TouriSMEshare aims to analyze the collaborative economy in a specific sector: sustainable tourism and cultural heritage, whose purpose is to promote tourism services with less environmental and sociocultural impacts, as well as achieving greater participation of tourists in the conservation of natural and cultural heritage.
The project TouriSMEshare is divided into three phases. The first one, is the launch of a survey that aims to ‘map’ all the existing platforms in the tourism and cultural sector. The results obtained will be part of the final report Guidelines to sharing economy services in tourism and cultural heritage. The survey is now available online for all collaborative economy companies. It is open on the web www.tourismeshare.eu/survey
The second action that will be developed will be a meeting between all the actors involved in the collaborative economy: entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs, investors, legislators, politicians and also consumers, to exchange ideas and experiences. The last phase, already in 2019, will be to identify and select startups to carry out free personalized advice to help them implement their business.