Wednesday, 22 February 2023 at 16:00-17:30 Zoom

A presentation by Christopher Meyer (PhD candidate at the Department of Business Administration of TalTech)

Sustainable tourism is one of the key sectors in the South Baltic Sea Region (SBSR), which belongs to the role model for sustainability—the Baltic Sea Region (BSR). In this context, resilience, recovery and sustainability become key common threads calling for new approaches mitigating negative impacts, upscaling resilience capacity and boosting recovery in the post-pandemic era. The present work aims at revealing conceptual and practical pathways for policy makers and businesses in revitalizing sustainable tourism in the region by emphasizing cultural and creative industries (CCIs) as strong contributors to sustainable development and economic ecosystems, such as tourism. Tourism is also one of the key thematic areas of the smart specialization strategies (S3) in the SBSR. However, there is almost no link between CCIs’ potential for sustainable and resilient tourism and their contribution to the co-design and co-creation of S3. CCIs are rather absent agents in quadruple helix networks supporting S3 policy implementation. The literature on this topic is still premature and represents a clear gap in knowledge. By virtue of these circumstances, the present research investigates how CCIs contribute and reveal new linkages between local assets, potential markets and societal challenges by engaging them as proven sustainable innovation and transition brokers in transnational quadruple helix partnerships following S3 policies in accordance with the sustainable development goals (SDGs), thus supporting sustainable and resilient tourism. Moreover, this paper aims at advocating for development of rural and peripheral regions, thus reducing the so-called “rural marginalization”. In addition, this paper also supports ongoing recent discussions on related vs. unrelated diversification policy within the S3 realm.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/su14063469

Christopher Meyer, PhD candidate at the School of Business and Governance, Tallinn University of Technology, supervised by Prof. Dr. Gunnar Prause. He is currently working on his PhD thesis “Re-Shaping Smart Specialisation Strategies (S3): Design and Implementation of Regional Innovation for Sustainability Transition” elaborating S3 as European and regional innovation policy and improve its understanding on research, policy and business level. As Project Coordinator at the University of Wismar, he is regularly working in European Research & Innovation projects across various fields such as CCI innovation, maritime sector or regional development. Recently, he has founded his own company FundBroker GmbH to assist different public and private entities to design and implement projects and acquire necessary fundings across different programmes.

The seminar is in English. Further information: pia.riips@taltech.ee.