Bluesprout – Boosting blue Entrepreneurs’ competences towards an environmental care ecosystem

Coastal areas are important for growth and jobs, however, many of the SMEs that make up the sector struggle with a variety of challenges and cannot adequately exploit this potential alone.Taking advantage of the blue growth opportunities requires an adequately and educated workforce that will have the ability and knowledge to use and apply latest technologies and tools and equipment, filling in a number of gaps. A healthy environment and high-quality services will make coastal areas more appealing for marine and nautical tourism activities, sports, and green tourism. Therefore, specific strategies drawing on innovative and attractive policies and products must be put forward to capture the potential of marine tourists in low season.In order to reduce this gap, Bluesprout aims to train both new and already active professionals in the field towards a more “blue oriented” management system which applicates the best sustainability practices. The Consortium believes that the overall tourism’s sector and the marine one in particular, suffering of skills shortage will benefit from new skilled people capable of propose new sustainable tourism packages and services encouraging at the same time a more sustainable tourist behaviour. Professionals should necessarily have an innovative approach to take advantage of new opportunities, valorising at the same time the peculiarity resources of a territory to please the new touristic demand, for that reason the project aims to focus its intervention on improving services and developing a touristic product perceived as sustainable and environmental-friendly.