Europe, Middle East & Africa

Stockholm, Sweden. 22-23 January 2008
TCI Board of Directors was kindly invited to participate in the European Presidential Conference on Innovation and Clusters, organised by the Swedish and Slovenian governmet on 22-23 January 2008 in Stockholm, Sweden, under the Slovenian Presidency.

Barcelona, 7 February 2008
The Urban Cluster Day in Barcelona is coming to its second edition. The very successful first conference in 2007 is promising an interesting repetition this year. 22@ is a close partner of TCI in Barcelona.

The Innovation Journalism Program at Stanford University will get more Finnish fellows for next five years. Helsingin Sanomat Foundation and Sitra, the Finnish Innovation Fund, have agreed to pay the necessary fees, travel expenses and living costs for three Finnish Innovation journalism fellows per year for six months, starting February 2008. The total sum of money invested for five years is approximately 700.000 euros.

The European Cluster Observatory - a new platform for information on and analysis of clusters, cluster organisations and cluster policies in Europe, produced by the Center for Strategy and Competitiveness at the Stockholm School of Economics (www.sse.edu/csc), has been launched.

The EU Commissioner for Science and Research, Janez Potocnik, held a speech in favor of Innovation Journalism at the Stanford po Stanford regional innovation journalism conference in Ljubljana, Slovenia, on June 14th.

At a TCI dialogue symposium on policy renewal in San Sebastian hosted by the Basque Country, five regions of Europe with substantial experience in cluster policy met to discuss and learn from each other. The idea of this symposium already arised in the Annual Conference in Lyon in 2006 during one of the breakouts on policy renewal.

Veneto Innovazione is organizing an international cluster conference in Venice in January 18th-19th 2007 under the theme: Patterns of clusters evolution - models, practices, technologies and policies.

The conference aims to discuss the future of clusters, dealing with the quetions, how to structure the suitable organisational models, how to foster networking and trans-national cooperation and which inputs can give technologies and policies for cluster development.

Conference in Copenhagen on December 14 - starting point for PRO INNO Europe!
PRO INNO Europe is a new initiative of Directorate General Enterprise and Industry which aims to become the focal point for innovation policy analysis, learning and development in Europe, with the view to learning from the best and contributing to the development of new and better innovation policies in Europe.

Aho group report

The European Commission - faced with the increasing challenges of globalization - set up in late 2005 a group of four high-level experts, chaired by former Prime Minister of Finland, Esko Aho, to assess the situation and make proposals to boost Europe's research and innovation performance.

This conference was held under the auspices of The Deputy Prime Minister of the Czech Republic and is organised by CzechInvest. The theme of the Brno conference "The role of Innovation in Growing Competitive Clusters".