SMALL and medium enterprises in County Clare are being invited to participate in an EU project aimed at improving the IT capabilities of rural businesses.
The Southern & Eastern Regional Assembly Mid-West Office, formerly MWRA, is one of six lead agencies in CREATE, which aims to deliver a full package of advice and support to SMEs to enable them to fully exploit the potential of an improved online presence, faster broadband, and hardware and software investments.
The project also aims to stimulate the virtual clustering of rural SMEs across partner regions of North West Europe, to help reduce expenses and the need for investment in expensive hardware technology for businesses through the shared use of hosted services.
An expert workgroup of IT and online marketing professionals from across the CREATE partner regions are presently conducting a review of the Irish and European rural-based businesses before presenting them with individual actions plans aimed at introducing efficiencies.
CREATE advisors were in Ennis this week to discuss progress in relation to the project as well as launch a new CREATE app for participating businesses to monitor their progress.
Ms. Majella O’Brien, EU Projects Officer for the Southern & Eastern Regional Assembly (SERA) Mid-West Office explained that 10 Clare businesses are currently part of a pilot review which is hoped will lead to more than 650 SME’s across rural parts of Ireland and the rest of Europe being engaged in the CREATE project.
Ms. O’Brien acknowledged that rural Irish business are presently behind their European counterparts in embracing IT advancements such as cloud clustering.
“The reviews of rural Clare SMEs show their competitiveness is undermined by a lack of investment in IT infrastructure and a poor online presence. Their participation in CREATE will include specialist support through business advisors, access to e-guides providing ideas on how to use broadband effectively, access to virtual cloud clusters enabling businesses to collaborate with others regardless of their location, and access to specialist experts to help businesses up-skill, network and collaborate to develop new products and markets,” she maintained.
Gerard Dollard, Director of Services with Clare County Council, which is an associate CREATE partner, noted that access to proper ICT infrastructure is a “constant challenge” for rural areas.
“The development of rural enterprises, indeed the development of all small enterprises, is a challenging agenda. That challenge is made all the greater by the particular constraints and limitations that apply to rural areas. I am confident that the work of the CREATE project and the exchange of experiences that will occur through the project will provide a very positive input to addressing some of the challenges that exist,” he added.
A native of Ennis, Colin McGann has been editor of The Clare Champion since August 2020. Former editor of The Clare People, he is a journalism and communications graduate of Dublin Institute of Technology.