The project HERITAG aims to develop an interdisciplinary reform in higher education programmes at master level and continuing education integrating Geo-information Technologies (GIT) applied to cultural heritage documentation, tourism management and entrepreneurship.The project promotes the synergy of three main groups of stakeholders: Universities, industry and Administration. The curricular reform integrates the development of capacities in 3 main national and regional priorities in Georgia and Armenia: Geo-information technologies, cultural heritage preservation and documentation, and fostering tourism business and entrepreneurship.Specific goals of the project are: - To create interdisciplinary master specialities in GIT for cultural heritage and tourism, integrating marketing and entrepreneurship skills oriented to consolidate local industry, following the guidelines of the Bologna process.- To establish Geoinformation and Tourism Technology centres (GTTC) in partner countries devoted to train professionals in GIT applied to cultural heritage and tourism, documentation of architectural and historical monuments and to disseminate the history, culture and landscapes using modern geovisualization techniques.- To create three new GIS laboratories in Tourism Economics Departments and to update existing equipment in partner country universities.- To foster the continuous education in Higher Education institutions of current professionals by creating interdisciplinary training modules.- To re-train academic staff in GIT, tourism management and entrepreneurship.- To introduce and improve good practices for quality assurance in partner countries universities.- To establish organized links between universities, administration and society to train professionals, creating labor market days, introducing GIT in tourism industry, promoting local entrepreneurship and establishing the basis to protect, document and disseminate cultural heritage and history.

Armenia, Georgia, Belarus and Kazakhstan are currently facing economical difficulties as consequences of economic policy, recent international financial crisis, collapse of world oil/gas prices and economcal slow down in China and other emerging countries. The situation causes an urgent need to implement structural economic reform to transform traditional economy to diversified, knowledge-based and innovation-driven economy. However, present higher education in these countries does not have a strong link to innovation and entrepreneurship. It has failed to become the drivning force to create new innovative enterprises which lead to new jobs and economic growth.This project aims to enhance innovation competences and entrepreneurial skills in engineering education through university-business cooperation in order to support creation of new enterprises, new jobs and economic growth in the partner countries.The specific objectives of the project are to:- foster an innovation culture among partner university staff and students- establish 8 innovation centers at partner countries- provide training to 104 partner country staff on innovation and entrepreneurship - introduce innovation pedagogy in teaching and learning- define transversal innovation competences and develop tools to assess such competences- introduce new courses on innovation and entrepreneurship to engineering students- promote university-business cooperation- provide business incubator and start-up accelerator services to staff and students to develop successful businesses- organize an innovation competition to promote entrepreneurship- disseminate project results to other universities in the partner countries- help partner countriey to develop a national innovation strategyThe project is coordinated by Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Sweden, with 2 more EU universities, 8 partner country universities, 4 education ministries as well as 1 NGO and 3 small private enterprises.