CI-NOVATEC focuses upon Local Tourism Clusters (LTCs) which formulate one of the most significant factors of regional economies of CBC area. LTCs consist of geographically concentrated SMEs, providing services to the same customer i.e. the arriving visitor, and may belong to various market sectors i.e. Tourism, Creative Industry, Agrofood, Commerce, Leisure, Transportation etc.

At local level, the microSMEs forming the LTCs along with Points of Interest (POIs) managers are responsible for hugely influencing the tourist's experience ΚΑΙ perception of the visiting area, affecting their behavior, which has a sequential impact on the LTCs' viability.

CI-NOVATEC proposes the approach of "Tourism Ecosystems" at micro-region level, including LTC SMEs along with Focal and Pivot POI managers. Such Ecosystems exist in CBC area, are important economic development assets and need to be studied and enhanced in order to achieve higher competitiveness and ensure future viability.

Common challenge for the 3 Regions is to record and evaluate visitors' experiences and perceptions of individual products as well as composite services at the level of Tourism Ecosystems, in order to collect qualitative end-user data, to draw comparative conclusions (at regional and CB level) and provide feedback and tools to both Ecosystems and policy making actors.

Such knowledge provides the necessary customer intelligence to understand economic performance of LTCs, to assist business-level decision making and boost efficiency and sustainability of cluster SMEs. Additionally, data trends may point at enhancing certain managerial ΚΑΙ organizational skills of POI managers.

Overall objective of CI-NOVATEC is to enhance local Tourism Ecosystems performance by introducing innovative techniques and technologies for collecting experience related (result-driven), visitor (bottom-up) data, which will be analyzed to outline customer (tourists) intelligence, in order to assist business-level ΚΑΙ policy-level decision making.

Main CI-NOVATEC outputs:

• Registry with the Points of Interest (FPIs and PPIs) for each participating Region.
• ICT based system for collecting result-driven, bottom-up data, enhancing Customer Intelligence in CB Tourism Clusters of SMEs.
• Scalable Customer Intelligence platform consisting of Mobile Applications and a backend Big Data Management system.
• Datasets of visitors' experience related data attributed with locality and chronological coordinates.
• Training seminars ΚΑΙ material for Tourism Ecosystem members (LTCs, PPIs and FPIs, administrative and policy actors).
• CB synthesis report on visitors' satisfaction based upon at least 9000 tourist reports.
• CB LTC performance improvement study taking into consideration thematic ΚΑΙ geographical characteristics of pilot LTCs.
• Regional Tourism development policy papers i.e. guides for future investments, according to identified shortages, prospects, trends etc, addressed towards policy making actors and authorities.