Introduction to the Toolkit

Purpose and origins of the toolkit

This toolkit draws upon all of the work undertaken by the EMERGENCE project (2001-2003), funded by the European Commission’s Information Society Technologies (IST) Programme, and set up to measure and map eWork in the Global Information Society.

EMERGENCE has:

analysed the incidence of eWork world-wide using extant statistical sources (Huws, Jagger, Bates, 2001)
conducted large scale sample surveys of organisations across EU countries plus the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Australia (Huws, O’Regan, 2001)
carried out 62 company case studies in the 18 European countries, plus additional relocation regions outside of Europe (Flecker, Kirschenhofer, 2002)
undertaken supplementary surveys of small firms in Belgium, Denmark, Ireland and Australia (Dejonckheere, Ramioul, Van Hootegem, 2002)
developed an eWork forecasting model and recommendations to statistical offices (Huws, 2001)
examined the specific situation of southern European countries (Altieri et al., 2002)
examined the specific situation of eastern European countries. (Makó C, Keszi R, 2002)

The purpose of the EMERGENCE regional development toolkit is to:

distil the practical lessons from the EMERGENCE project and make these available to other IST projects and to policy makers in a condensed and structured manner in the form of a toolkit
provide practical tools for the preparation and implementation of regional development policies which take full account of the opportunities opened up by new forms of eWork.

More specifically, the toolkit will provide qualitative guidance and advice, drawn from EMERGENCE and other relevant sources. It is also liked with the eReadiness (interrogable) database which provides material for generating regional statistical profiles.

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