Project Description
On Friday the 28th of September, S-Com participated to the event Reclame in Florence.
The two-day event, promoted by “Rest-Arte – Fondazione per i beni culturali no profit”, was focused around the theme of creative communication, presenting opportunities, institutional funding, technologies and instruments to communicate creativity and enhance visibility.
Valentina Zoccali, Secretary General of S-Com, gave a speech in the thematic group on the “Institutional Creative Communication” to present the opportunities on research and innovation at European level for communicators, creative communication enterprises and artists.
S-Com is in itself an example of a network of communicators that, since 2005, works on enriching the dialogue with EU institutions and EU stakeholders on the theme of “sustainable communication”, intended as inclusive and participatory communication processes. By doing so, S-Com has become a bridge between EU institutions and local citizens, establishing links between the contents promoted by the institutional bodies and the inputs and ideas coming from local entities. Two examples can be the first Campaign “Media Initiative” launched in 2012 to Promote Media Pluralism and the last campaign, WISE4All, which was launched in 2015 to promote women contribution to innovation. WISE4All network now counts 14 organizations from all over Europe and it contributes to the overall reflections on ethics, social inclusion, combating stereotypes and the building of an inclusive society.
In addition to these campaigns, S-Com has been participating to several EU-funded projects, being able to develop and experiment processes and actions of sustainable communication and, through the dialogue established with EU institutions, it has consolidated them. Some of the projects in which S-Com participated as the communication and dissemination partner were: MEDSPRING, MERID and XF-ACTORS; all of them were financed under two Research and Innovation (R&I) programmes of the European Commission, the 7th Framework Programme and Horizon 2020.
Communication is indeed considered by the European Commission as a strategic element in the framework of R&I. The dissemination and exploitation of the results stemming from the R&I project are key for the Horizon 2020 and for reaching the expected economic, social and environmental outcomes. That is why, communication and dissemination, along with the management and coordination of the project, are mandatory activities in the EU-funded R&I project.
Arts and creativity play a role too in boosting innovation capacity. To this end, the STARTS initiative (Science and Technology + ARTS) was born to remove the boundaries between art and engineering to stimulate creativity and innovation. One of the goals is therefore to include artists in research projects (through the Horizon 2020 call for proposal in the ICT-LEIT Work Programme ICT-32-2018: STARTS – The Arts stimulating innovation), which foresee starts residencies of artists in technology institutions and of scientists and technologists in studio of artist.
In addition to the R&I programme, there are other opportunities for media and communication professionals, such as the MEDIA subprogramme of Creative Europe, which supports the EU film and audiovisual companies, and other opportunities related to the contract services that the European Commission launches to support its communication, as well as opportunities coming from the DG Communication.
It has been a pleasure to participate to the Reclame event because it allowed us to present the work of S-Com to an audience of creative people and communicators who were interested in the theme of creative communication and opportunities coming from the European Union. This stimulated us to further work to pursue our objective: building a sustainable society through inclusive and participatory communication processes.
LET’S TALK ABOUT CREATIVITY. LET’S TALK ABOUT INNOVATION. LET’S TALK ABOUT EUROPE.
More information on the Reclame event can be found here.