be of interest for many private players in the tourism sector. DANTE partners emphasised that this kind of data produced by PAs constitutes “valuable elements for private enterprises that offer weather forecasting services. As part of tourism in mountain and rural areas, to share information about hiking trails is very important to exploit territories usually undervalued”. I-SPEED also stressed that there were no difficulties related with privacy and security issues as open data is produced by PAs. Integration of the project and added value to public policies. Generally speaking, the INTERREG IVC projects were not developed only for their own benefit. Their partners are keen to fit in current public policies and to generate an effective added-value to policies. From this perspective, the following projects were also successful: OSEPA produced a series of papers to raise European decision-maker awareness of legal, technical, and financial aspects of FOSS adoption. E-CREATE leaders mentioned that the project was integrated into local and regional digital strategies. Thanks to its implementation plan, DANTE contributed to setting up common recommendations based on its experience, both at local and European, especially in terms of integration between IT and tourism policies. Obtaining the opinions of stakeholders in the tourism sector, who had a strong experience, was also a real added-value to policies by integrating their feedback. E-CITIZEN helped to shape and develop policies related to e-participation. I-SPEED emphasised that the involvement of policymakers from the beginning and in the three political steering groups was a guarantee that IT and tourism policies are more linked and integrated. In addition, the I-SPEED project helped three regions to be successful in the implementation of their digital tourism strategies (a region of Crete, of Bulgaria, and the Powys County). Contribution to Smart Specialisation Strategies On public policy integration, the contribution of projects to Smart Specialization Strategies is a key-issue for the next phase of Structural Funds Operational Programmes. For INTERREG IVC projects, identifying how to meet the needs of specialization seemed to be difficult. There are two explanations: the idea of Smart Specialization Strategies emerged while many of these projects were already defined and in an on-going process. Second is that a project can be a priority for a region without contributing to specialization. For instance, the deployment of FOSS is now considered as crucial according to many local and regional authorities to improve service efficiency and to reduce costs. Meanwhile, if the software industry in the region is not particularly well developed or if there is no open software cluster, it will be difficult for this region to contribute to the Smart Specialization process. Unsurprisingly, where they responded, INTERREG IVC project partners indicated their projects did not reinforce the S3 process. DANTE partners mentioned that “the project will not contribute to any specialization approach since the preliminary objective is to find possible relationships and links between the tourism sector and the ‘ICT world’, which have different approaches and basic principles”. But though the integration of IT and tourism policies, it might be possible to contribute to the S3 process by accelerating the performance of tourism offers and developing a new proactive tourism. DANTE leaders also mentioned that “any real and concrete Smart Specialization Strategy in a territory is (only) possible if the ICT approach is not really involving stakeholders and citizens in a deep way”. I-SPEED indicated that the contribution to S3 should be ensured by avoiding market fragmentation and better managing the innovation process through the involvement of stakeholders, public-private partnerships, and the participation of universities. Project assessment. Project assessment was not really developed within INTERREG IVC projects. Four reasons may explain this fact: Assessment was not planned for in the project; The project was not finished; The evaluation culture is not effectively developed and shared and so was forgotten; Evaluation was seen as ‘ex-post’ evaluation, but not as ongoing or (‘in itinere’) which seeks to obtain information during the project in order to integrate it into the project process.
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