Improving employment. The planned programme of work contains many opportunities for commercial exploita- tion of developments of the systems which it will create. Both of the institutions involved have active support infrastructure for developing technology transfer and entrepreneurial exploitation. We predict that this will be the likely route for exploitation of the ideas and new employment opportunities. Our programme of work has opportunities for students at each of the institutions involved to participate in the project and this would be a potential source of capable staff.
Improving employment. As the EU moves from an industrial to an information society, employment moves to the skills of the information society. Quality software/hardware products are the basis of these key skills. Employment levels in Europe will be positively influenced by ARTIST, because the project helps the European computing community develop high quality products, which will, in turn, bring their benefits to all EU employees. The labour forces that will be freed by the shortened development cycle of the next generation of products will accelerate the establishment of the Information Society, together with its foreseen benefits to the EU employment. Finally, cross-fertilization of ideas through close collaboration between the EU and affiliated states will improve the competitiveness of European companies, fuel their growth and increase their capacity to create new jobs.
Improving employment. The toolkit developed has a great potential to enhance products of the computer games industry. If the technology of the toolkit were combined with current gaming technologies, there is the possibility to create new games with a potentially wider audience. As such, adoption of the technology by European gaming companies would potentially give them an advantage over competitors from elsewhere in the world, encourage growth and increase employment. To set this effect on employability in context, Europe accounts for approximately $7 billion of the $20 billion worldwide games industry. As such, the games industry (which includes household names such as EIDOS, Infogrammes and Ubi Soft) is a major player in employment. In addition, other reports highlight that the digital media industries have the potential to grow at 20% per year.14 The digital content industries, who could apply the results of this project, through for example enhanced virtual webcasting or sales agents, have an impact on a number of other areas of the ICT industry such as networks, equipment and software applications.15 In this way, the project has the potential to contribute to increased employment both within the industries in which its results will be applied and related industries. The wider use of the VICTEC toolkit, could also have an impact on employability. Reports show that multimedia training can result in more people learning faster, achieving higher levels of skills and retaining more knowledge than traditional instructor led training. It can effectively re-engineer the transfer of knowledge and skills that employees need to execute their jobs. Therefore it can make an important contribution to the employability goals of the European Union.16 By enhancing this advantage, VICTEC has the potential to have an impact on employability of EU citizens.
