Futures by Design in different regional contexts

Futures by Design (2019-2022) was an Interreg project carried out in six
European North Sea regions with the goal to support the digitization trajectory of
small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Beneficiaries in the regions of
Cambridgeshire, England, Halland, Sweden, Bremen-Osterholz and Papenburg,
Germany, Groningen and Friesland, the Netherlands and Antwerp, Belgium
worked together with local SMEs in workshops or individual sessions to reach
their self-defined goals of digitizing part of their business processes. The
beneficiaries functioned as facilitators of change, mainly providing support in
terms of different perspectives offered and introductions to a range of important
digital tools or software to work more efficiently. Although the organizations
involved in futures by design shared a common aim in wanting to facilitate data-
driven work processes in local SMEs, the institutional and economic contexts in
which the organizations operated varied markedly. Similarly, there were regional
differences in terms of the individual characteristics of the SMEs involved in the
project, importantly also in their data maturity level. Given the different regional
contexts in which futures by design was executed, the regions put forward their
own tailor-made, region-specific approaches to reaching the same goal of
improving data usage for business success. As part of the evaluation of the
project, this report addresses the regionally different approaches, communalities
and main takeaways.