Communication, Dissemination and Exploitation Strategy

The purpose of the Communication, Dissemination and Exploitation Strategy is to guide how the INTERLACE project communicates with its many different stakeholders; how it shares knowledge and achieves impact; and how the outputs of INTERLACE can be made available in formats that encourage innovation and long-term use.

Communication, dissemination and exploitation (abbreviated to CDE) are closely related and inter-dependent, but they are not all the same thing.

• Communication is about talking with people; promoting INTERLACE and its results beyond the project’s own community; and communicating our work in ways that non-specialists can easily understand.
• Dissemination is about sharing things with people. It's about transferring INTERLACE knowledge and outputs to those who can best make use of them; and maximising the impact of our work.
• Exploitation is about helping people to use the outputs of INTERLACE. It's about encouraging application of INTERLACE results in activities beyond the project itself; and using the results to create and market new products, services or processes.

Communication is a big topic and CDE Strategis can sometimes be long and overly-complex. Consequently, people find it difficult to use them and communications activity defaults to 'business as usual'. But that it not the ethos of INTERLACE. Here, we are 'business unusual'! Our project is about doing things differently; being agile and experimental; challenging old conventions and trying to find better solutions; and we must capture that energy in how we communicate.

The CDE Strategy is currently available as a first draft document, which is now open to review.

We encourage all partners - and especially the city teams and anyone else working directly with stakeholders - to read the document and share your thoughts about it with us. Visit the CDE Strategy Test Area to find out how.