Exploration of Exploitation Approaches of European Projects on ICT and Foreign Language Learning: the CEFcult project case

As employees increasingly work in international, multi-cultural settings, success in intercultural professional communication requires not only language skills, but also the ability to understand and deal with cultural differences. The European project CEFcult (www.cefcult.eu) develops an online platform which aims to support the joint achievement of these competences by offering authentic scenarios, validated assessment frameworks and a community of people (both novices and experts) with similar interests. The European Commission strongly emphasizes the importance of implementing projects’ outcomes in different contexts and settings after the projects’ life. This is not so easy, as it requires involvement and dedication of different types of organizations, from business as well as from the academic side. In this paper we focus on the approach to exploitation taken within the CEFcult project. We first describe the general characteristics of the project, in order to enable the audience to assess the transferability of the described exploitation approach to their (European) projects. Then we describe how we engaged with various types of stakeholders, in order to derive a suitable exploitation approach. We describe the method and instruments used to collect information and acquire insights from these stakeholders. This approach led us to several business models, which can feasibly be adopted by the CEFcult project, but also provide inspiration and function as examples for similar European projects. To be viable, even after the project, these business models need practical implementation. We describe how we developed criteria and evaluated potential business models, in order to come to a practical, commonly adopted and grounded exploitation strategy.