YooniK joins consortium for innovation in the tourism sector Written on 31 Mar 2022

Lisbon, March 31, 2022

YooniK, a leader in privacy-first hands-free authentication, is delighted to announce the launch of the European consortium Tourism 4.0 aimed at stimulating innovation uptake in the tourism sector and providing financial support to over 100 start-ups.

Composed of 10 leading partners from 6 countries from tourism, innovation and business services sectors, Tourism4.0 will assist over 100 tourism and digital SME/startups, stimulating digital transformation and innovation uptake towards improving economic, environmental and well-being outcomes.

Tourism 4.0 aims at developing a capacity building, technology transfer, support and assistance programme to enable tourism sector SMEs to adopt and leverage emerging digital technologies to improve their productivity, sustainability and overall business performance.

The main objectives are:

Technical and business assistance.
Peer-learning, training and awareness support.
Financial support to tourism SMEs.

More specifically:

Building network platform that will bring SMEs, technology providers, public authorities and tourism stakeholders to build an ecosystem for knowledge transfer, peer learning and innovation uptake.
Developing an open innovation challenge aimed at identifying digital SMEs/startups with disruptive solutions to the tourism sector.
Developing funding scheme to assist tourism SMEs in digital transformation and innovation uptake, through Innovation & Feasibility Assessment Projects, in cooperation with innovation service providers.
Digital technologies skills upgrading, mentoring and assistance programmes run by technology/business experts to build capacity, know-how and technology transfer opportunities.
Supporting smart innovation and novel initiatives via partners from cross-disciplinary areas including ICT, digital technologies and sustainability.
Use cases identification or flagship initiatives to demonstrate SMART tourism solutions to allow for cross-regional and transnational transfer of best practices.
Promoting workshops/webinars/conferences on new trends and routes for post-Covid recovery, including networking with public/private tourism stakeholders and investors.

Consortium partners include: Federturismo Confindustria, NEST Centro de Inovação do Turismo, City of Dubrovnik Development Agency, Cluster Digital de Catalunya, Malta Business Bureau, AEI Cluster Turismo de Extremadura, Association of Employers in Croatian Hospitality, Málaga TechPark, Regional Pomeranian Chamber of Commerce and, naturally, YooniK.

The project consortium has a duration of 25 months and has received funding by the European Innovation Council and SMEs Executive Agency (EISMEA) of the European Commission. The total private/public investment will be 1.3M€, of which 420k€ will be to directly support tourism start-ups.

"Innovation is mostly about open collaboration and interplay between different industries and disciplines. It is about making tools and knowledge widely available, so anyone can create new awesome applications. With the Tourism 4.0 consortium, the stage is set to build a large network of 100+ disruptive innovators together with experienced tourism ecosystems for exchanging best-practices and foster innovation uptake. We are very happy to be a part of it!", said Pedro Torres, co-founder and CEO of YooniK.

YooniK is looking forward to working with all consortium partners and the ecosystem emerging around the project to build the tourism of the future.

Let's go!

About YooniK

YooniK simplifies all customer interactions with private, convenient, and secure face authentication on any device. Ranking Top 5 for accuracy in live face matching in the combined business regions of Europe and Americas, as independently certified by the international benchmark, and featuring a decentralized zero-knowledge privacy architecture, YooniK solves a longstanding privacy challenge: it breaks with decades of centralized biometric databases while enabling a fully handsfree experience, thus bringing unprecedented levels of privacy, convenience, accuracy, and user trust when adopting face authentication in daily routines.

For more information visit the company website or its LinkedIn.