Bearing has today delivered a pre-feasibility report to the East Sweden region, titled “The Digtal Visitor”. The purpose of the study has been to describe the initial findings for development of an integrated project based on the concept of the “Digitial Visitor” to the Östergötland region of Sweden, documenting the experiences and emotions driven by the abundance of water and cultural landscape, and how digital technologies can be used to enhance the touristic experience.
The approach which the project team took was to work with multi-level consultation of the issues facing the region of Östergötland, by engaging stakeholders in a “top down” and “bottom up” approach, by looking closely and understanding the local context and issues as well as the wider Regional issues and challenges in the integrated tourism offering.
All meetings undertaken during the pre-feasibility period represent only a start to the consultation process. These “inclusive” one-to-one individual interviews with key stakeholders is very much the opening of doors for the further stages of this project, by reaching out to as many people as possible for discussions and research. For personal and business integrity reasons we have agreed to only list the names of the organisations interviewed and not to publish any of the abstracts from the meetings.
The key goals of the pre-feasibility phase stakeholder consultation was to achieve the following:
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Raise awareness of the Digital Visitor project as a possible integrated project for regional development and how it could be aligned with the requirements ready to apply for European Union project funding.
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Identify, engage and unite stakeholders and to understand their views, interests and to start consensus building within the project.
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To gather evidence in order to start identifying key local and regional challenges and possibilities in project preparation and realisation.
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To identify additional stakeholders and issues which will need to be explored further and addressed in more detail during the following stages of project preparation.
We believe that Östergötland can easily rival any of the other world class attractions we have identified and documented in the benchmarking section of the report, and furthermore the region’s digital marketing of the tourism sector can also become world class. However, to develop such a project will require an extensive integrated project preparation phase where emphasis is not only placed on the planning for the integration, restoration and enhancement of Östergötland’s cultural and other touristic assets, but also building on the existing brand development and engaging all sectors of the quad helix co-operation model.