Zitec Blog

Connecting the dots - The CIRCLE’s digital learnings for a sustainable business

Written by Simona Negru | Feb 21, 2023 9:41:05 AM

Learn how The CIRCLE brings awareness to the importance of innovative technology, creativity, wellbeing and sustainability with their Barn Rising event.

In today’s digital age, you need to constantly stay on top of trends and reimagine your business strategy to make it more efficient and, ultimately, profitable. The concept of digital transformation can change the course of your organization. But, to do so, it is important to have the necessary digital know-how to be able to deliver innovation, engaging customer experiences and business efficiency. 

As one of the 4 organizers of The CIRCLE project, we embarked on the endeavor to help entrepreneurs and freelancers become more resilient by developing must-have digital skills. In the following lines, you will find out how, in a Barn Rising event, we created the perfect space for the participants to put into practice and share the knowledge we imparted throughout the project's workshops.

The CIRCLE - a glance into a business resiliency European project

The Crossector Impact through Creativity, Wellbeing and Entrepreneurship, or simply put The CIRCLE, is a project that presents an innovative approach which allows creatives and non-creatives to overcome challenges by developing digital, creative, sustainability, and wellbeing skills.

The program kicked off in June 2021 as part of a European Union’s series of cross-country, cross-disciplinary projects dedicated to freelancers and entrepreneurs. It was developed by four partners: Impact Hub Bucharest, Impact Hub Madrid, Matera Hub and Zitec. The main scope was to bring creative and non-creative people together with specialists of business and technical backgrounds, who were willing to share business creativity and digital knowledge. 

An impactful avenue for developing sustainable decisions

The environment created by The CIRCLE encouraged participants from Romania, Spain and Italy to venture into networking, collaboration, learning, ideas, initiatives and brainstorming sessions. 

Thus, from October 2021 until January 2023, the four partners hosted a series of workshops addressing how to build and apply cross-disciplinary frameworks. These workshops aimed to make the participants be interested in practicing their business creativity and digital skills and learning more about business sustainability and helpful business tools. In addition to this, the participants benefited from Zitec’s digital knowledge and skills, as our specialists leveraged their wide experience in digital transformation. The freelancers and entrepreneurs put to good use these learning circles as they broadened their experience on how to reach better results. 

The Barn Raising event - sedimenting the path to entrepreneurial and digital wellbeing

As all these online and offline digital wellbeing workshops and traveling circles had already created the theoretical basis for digital transformation and digital skills, the next logical step was to allow the participants to put their knowledge into practice. 

As such, on January 18th, 2023, we created a Barn Rising event for peer-to-peer sharing. The event was held at Zitec’s headquarters in Bucharest and it tackled concepts regarding the Customer to client journey

During the event, Zitec’s experts disseminated significant entrepreneurship learnings regarding the customer journey map, the buyer persona and target market, their pain points and needs, or any useful approaches in order to meet the end-user's requirements. The event concluded with a sharing on-the-run session, where the entrepreneurs and creatives discussed the resources that could bring value to their business in order to thrive in the digital world. 

Graduating from The CIRCLE - what’s next

In the wake of this entire learning experience during these years, The CIRCLE wanted to offer its participants the perfect ground to share their stories and achievements. And what better opportunity to end the project than organizing an online festival? 

The goal of this European project was to allow entrepreneurs and creatives to enlarge their knowledge and become more resilient and prosperous and successfully apply these insights within their businesses. This is why, at the end of February 2023, The CIRCLE will host an online Festival presenting the future of the digital landscape and the rise of AI in the creative field. The actual results of this program will be presented in a future blog post. Stay tuned for the amazing outcomes.

Zitec, supporting digital transformation endeavors through Innovation Grants Consulting

Zitec joined The CIRCLE through its very own Innovation Grants Consulting service, which provides the clients with professional consultancy in obtaining grants for their projects implementation and accessing innovative technologies.

To gain more digital competencies and make a difference with your business’ success, let’s discuss.