Issue N° 101 - July/August 2012
Dear INSMEnews Readers,
the first half of the year has already passed by…
It was quite a challenging and interesting period marked by a high number of valuable initiatives, meetings, conferences and accomplishments (as for example the 8th INSME Annual Meeting at Daejeon, South Korea).
Our network has welcomed further new members to the growing INSME family and we are delighted to count at today on 93 members from 37 different countries all over the world.
Now we are approaching the Summer Break and myself and the whole INSME Team wish you a relaxing (holiday) period to regenerate strengths and positive energy to develop new constructive ideas for further successful collaboration also in the second half of 2012.
To say it with the poet Wallace Stevens: “The summer night is like a perfection of thought!”
Together with this inspiring photo I wish to all INSMEnews followers a good break!
The next INSMEnews edition will be issued in September 2012.
The INSME Team welcomes your comments and inputs for further improvement of this service.
Subscribe to INSMEnews and you will receive it via e-mail as soon as it is available for non-Members (one month after its official launch).
Follow us also on Twitter and LinkedIn!
...and now as usual enjoy your reading!
Ms. Christin Pfeiffer
INSME Secretary general
Supporting organisations:
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Our 2013 main event will take place from 21st to 24th of May 2013 in Izmir, Turkey.
The 9th INSME Annual Meeting will be co-organized by IZKA - IZMIR Development Agency (INSME Member) under the theme: “The governance of innovation: building an innovative eco-system for SMEs”.
Why Turkey?
Turkey is a dynamic emerging market equipped with a network of developed infrastructure and a globally competitive work force. Its unique position at the crossroads of the world trade routes and its proximity to the developing energy producing regions in the Caspian and Central Asia are factors that further raise its potential for the coming years.
Turkey’s long-standing relations with the EU and familiarity with most EU regulations and policies will accelerate the accession process and allow Turkey to achieve full membership more quickly than expected.
In order to have more information about the Turkish economic environment, please read the Trade and Development Report 2011: “Post-crisis policy challenges in the world economy”.
Furthermore, stay tuned on the 9th INSME Annual Meeting on the INSME Portal, INSME Twitter page and LinkedIn Profile or contact the INSME Secretariat at: secretariat@insme.it.
On the 8th - 9th of October 2012 the first International Workshop on “Leverage your Informal Competences: The Challenge of Interpersonal and Inter-functional Skills Management” will take place in Rome. The initiative is organized by INSME and its Member CEPAS.
CEPAS, an Italian no profit association and INSME Member since March 2012, is a Personnel and Training Courses certification body established in 1994 to answer and meet the market need to provide the highest level of competence and experience in professional activities.
The Workshop has the aim to offer insight knowledge on non-formal and informal competences in the field of international networking and intercultural communication.
Please note that this expert Workshop is open only to a limited number of participants, so do not hesitate to contact us at secretariat@insme.it to register as soon as possible.
The registration fee is: 450 Euros (+21% VAT).
To download the Flyer please click here.
We are looking forward to welcoming you to this challenging initiative!
Ms. Christin Pfeiffer, INSME Secretary General, gave a speech with the title “The importance of strategic partnerships for sustainable growth – some good practices examples from INSME” at the SEBRAE +20 Conference – side event of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development - Rio+20, that took place from 13th to 22nd of June 2012 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
SEBRAE (INSME Board Member) has been an official partner of the event.
The Conference focused on two themes: (1) a green economy in the context of sustainable development poverty eradication; (2) the institutional framework for sustainable development.
The event represented a success in order to adopt clear and focused practical measures for implementing sustainable development, based on the numerous examples of success we have seen over the last 20 years.
To learn more about the event, please click here.
In parallel with and between the official events, many side events, exhibitions, presentations, fairs and announcements by a wide range of partners have taken place.
View the Video of the event presented by SEBRAE during the 8th INSME Annual Meeting 2012.
Ms. Pfeiffer highlighted some good practice approaches from INSME Members with regards to sustainability management in SMEs.
Networks as INSME, NGOs, industrial associations and labor unions can play an active role in strengthening the network capabilities among all actors in the context of sustainable development and growth.
Why should companies invest in a sustainability strategy and add a dedicated management and monitoring to their already overloaded priorities?
Check Ms. Pfeiffer’s presentation here.
Faro, the seed capital, development and orientation fund was launched on 27thof May 2010 in the context of the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM) to boost the development of innovation on both sides of the Mediterranean Sea.
This subsidy will enable the promoters of small innovative projects to undertake feasibility studies for their partnership projects from various points of view: technical, financial, legal, commercial or managerial.
The creation of this fund is an example of the Union for the Mediterranean logic of encouraging SME development.
The last selection session is scheduled on November 30th, 2012.
There is one last chance for project owners to apply before the Faro Fund will be closed.
The Steering Committee decided to add an additional selection session to the ones originally foreseen.
The ANIMA Investment Network (INSME Member) is the Project Operator. The Faro fund associates the French Development Agency (l’Agence française de développement - AFD), the “Caisse des Dépôts” (CDC) and OSEO (INSME Board Member), around three main objectives:
The organizations which may be eligible for a Faro subsidy must meet the following criteria:
Any project of industrial research and/or experimental development in its feasibility phase is eligible: strategic positioning, project structuring, legal counseling or an intellectual property study.
Any project needs to involve a minimum of three players with at least one located in a Mediterranean country (Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Palestinian Authority, Syria, Tunisia and Turkey). Projects including several countries of the Southern Mediterranean will be given priority.
The projects must also fulfill the eligibility conditions set by the European Commission in terms of innovation.
Learn more at: http://www.faro-um.org/en/index.php.
The European IPR Helpdesk (INSME Partner) offers free of charge, first-line support on IP and IPR matters to beneficiaries of EU funded research projects and EU SMEs involved in transnational partnership agreements.
With SMEs being increasingly involved in internationalization processes, cross-border transaction and cooperation are the order of the day. Issues concerning Intellectual Property (IP) and Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) often play a crucial role in this context.
However, negotiating IP transactions is not an easy task and can be extremely demanding, particularly at the transnational level.
In order to avoid common missteps, the European IPR Helpdesk (INSME Partner) published a fact sheet addressing essential considerations that any person negotiating IP assets should bear in mind. First and foremost, as negotiations are deemed to start off with coming to sit at one table with your potential business partners, careful preparation beforehand proves to be fundamental for beneficial and successful discussions.
Read the full guide on “How to deal with IP in transnational negotiations” here.
If you want to know more about the European IPR Helpdesk please visit www.iprhelpdesk.eu.
The term “bad faith” is not directly defined in the existing Trademark Law. However, the concept has been adopted in China and has played an important role in both trademark Law and practice.
With the ever-increasing importance to both manufacturers and consumers of brand advertising and brand awareness, the commercial significance of trademarks continues to grow. Trademark abuse, including counterfeiting branded products and the wrongful registration of a trademark belonging to a person or company by another party (a bad faith registration), is a well-known problem in intellectual property law.
The fact that Chinese companies have registered a bad faith trademarks is one of the biggest complaints of European Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) that are trying to enter the Chinese market. These prior registrations can limit the foreign company’s freedom to operate by restricting its ability to enter the China market or even to source goods from China.
China IPR SME Help Desk (INSME Partner) issued this article in order to inform on how protecting trademarks against trademark grabbing and abusive bad faith trademark registrations.
Read the article here.
INSME is delighted to welcome its latest new Member, who joined our Network as Associate Member in July 2012: Innovation Business Development, INC., based in Saint Simons Island, Georgia (USA).
The 93rd INSME Member is a private for-profit business support organization with strong links to India and China.
IDB has the aim to assess the innovation process and synchronize it to deliver continuous improvements, cost savings, and streams of profitable new products and services.
Learn more about IBD at: http://www.innovationbd.com
At present INSME comprises 93 Members in 37 Countries in 4 continents.
To view the INSME Members’ profile visit: http://insme.org/insme-members.
If you are interest in joining our network please contact secretariat@insme.it
The aim of the public consultation is to gather inputs from stakeholders with the scope of creating possible future EU-level actions in demand-side policies for industrial innovation policy.
As Europe now has some initial experience in demand-side policies and the political and economic priorities are clear, the leverage potential of using these policies increases and more sectors could benefit from them.
A menu of policy tools is in place, but can be further elaborated. There are possibilities and needs for tailoring tools and support mechanisms by the market sector.
This must be one of the EU’s key ambitions. But the lack of demand for innovations blocks growth and competitiveness in many important European sectors.
Objective: The Commission is calling for ideas for potential new policy measures and focus areas for future targeted demand-side innovation actions at EU level, to enable faster uptake of innovations and to create a better environment for producing innovations in order to maintain the value and business investments in Europe.
Policy field: Enterprise
Target groups: All public authorities, organizations, businesses and citizens are welcome to contribute to this consultation.
Period of consultation: From 14th of June 2012 to 6th of September 2012
Questionnaire: The questionnaire falls into the following parts:
View the questionnaire here.
To read the Background paper, please click here.
This is a special Report of a Science|Business Conference which took place in Washington on May 7th, organized in cooperation with the Transatlantic Policy Network and with the support of the Federal Circuit Bar Association.
The focus was set on how this historic convergence could help inventors and the economy.
The Report highlights how the American and European systems for patents are starting to look more alike. As a consequence this process is going to have big implications for inventions, trade and economies on both sides of the Atlantic. With the changings in law in both Washington and Brussels, there is further space for even more harmonization left.
On one side, the EU has been trying to simplify its costly and complicated patent system.
On the other side, in the US the first major change in patent law since 1980 was signed in 2011, that made the US system a bit more European: “It does go a fair degree towards promoting international collaboration”.
To find out more, please download the Full Report here.
The Global Investment Promotion Best Practices 2012 was produced by the Investment Climate Department of the World Bank Group, which includes International Finance Corporation (IFC), Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA), and the World Bank. It was sponsored by the Government of Spain and ProInvest, a European Commission partnership program for the countries of Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific.
In the 2012 edition, the Global Investment Promotion Best Practices 2012 (GIPB 2012), focuses specifically on information provision in two sectors: tourism and agribusiness.
According to the Report, even as countries compete to attract investments, 80 percent of national investment promotion agencies are failing to respond to investor inquiries in the key sectors of agribusiness and tourism.
The Report assessing 189 economies’ responsiveness to investors highlights that investment promotion agencies are less responsive to direct investor inquiries than they were three years ago. It shows that limited resources need not be an obstacle to effectiveness.
Please note that the Report is also available in Arabic, French, Russian and Spanish.
To download the Full Report, please click here.
In collaboration with the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS), Ernst & Young has undertaken a cross-Europe survey of 680 business leaders to discover their perception of the EU’s innovation policy.
The Report suggests that a more streamlined and simplified system can deliver a market-driven innovation policy that will help catalyze growth.
According to the report, a more effective innovation policy across the EU is essential for Europe's competitive resurgence. The present most critical points in EU are the fragmentation of the rules (for example tax barriers), the obstacles to individuals’ mobility, the lack of common infrastructures. For all these reasons, a functioning internal market is considered the single most important reform for EU innovation.
Further information: www.ey.com/government-innovation
To download the Full Report, please click here.
The Research Report published in March 2012 by Flanders DC, the Flemish organization for entrepreneurial creativity, examines how small firms can benefit from open innovation networks.
To explore the link between open innovation and market success of SMEs, a multiple-case study using in-depth interviews with representatives of SMEs to find commonalities and success factors has been conducted.
Open innovation can take different shapes within each specific firm or industry. This is also a major message of the study: Each manager must develop open innovation activities that are relevant within the framework of the company’s strategy. The benefits of open innovation are therefore also specific to the strategic position and situation of each firm.
Open innovation is a relatively young economic phenomenon, and case-based research is an appropriate research method to analyze this explorative research topic.
To Download the Report, please click here.
NineSights launched on the 9th of June 2012 is the first open innovation social media destination which is free to innovation seekers and solution providers. NineSights is a secure and collaborative online community that connects innovators of all sizes with the resources and relationships needed to drive business value. The platform allows innovation seekers to post innovation needs and solution providers to submit proposals and post technologies that are “for sale.”
By joining NineSights’ secure social platform, people shall be able to view and respond to thousands of real opportunities for funding and partnerships immediately.
To find out more, please click here.
InnovationWeek is the name of the weekly e-newsletter issued by InnovationTools.com (sister site of InnovationManagement.se -INSME Partner). It represents a valuable executive summary of the latest news, research, strategies, tools and resources related to business creativity, brainstorming and innovation.
The topics covered by this e-newsletter are: Innovation research, strategies and trends; Best practices in innovation; Profiles of innovative companies and people; New frontiers in idea management; Innovation management trends; Innovation conferences and training; Creative thinking techniques; Reviews of new innovation and creativity books.
To read the latest InnovationWeek Newsletter, please click here.
Learn more about InnovationWeek at the following link:
http://www.innovationtools.com/News/subscribe.asp
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10th - 12th of September 2012
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The International Small Business Congress (ISBC), scheduled to take place in Johannesburg, South Africa, from 15th to 18th of September 2012, will be held under the theme: “Fostering small business in new and high-potential industries worldwide”. The event, organized by Osiba Research (INSME Member) in partnership with INSME, will gather individuals from governments, small business support agencies, entrepreneurs, business membership organizations, academia, financial institutions, international development agencies and various others with an interest in entrepreneurship and small business development around the world to discuss pertinent issues with regards to the promotion of entrepreneurship and small business worldwide.
07th - 11th of November 2012 WASME-World Association for Small and Medium Enterprises with the support of INSME, organizes the 18th International Conference on SMEs with the theme “Empowering women through entrepreneurship: issues, opportunities and approaches”. This event is particularly essential for achieving the goal of inclusive growth. It will identify various bottlenecks that hinder women participation in the businesses. The Conference will focus on the varied dimensions of empowering women through entrepreneurship as a central theme and globally emerged best practices towards promotion of women entrepreneurship. This prestigious event of WASME, will provide ample opportunity for global networking and an important platform for SMEs and their support institutions to benefit from the sharing of knowledge and experience.
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4th - 5th of August 2012
3rd International Conference on Innovation, Management and Service
Organized by International Economics Development and Research Center
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
16th of August - 1st of September 2012
European Forum Alpback "Expectations - The future of the young"
Organized by the European Forum Alpbach
Alpback, Tyrol
27th - 28th of August 2012
European Business Research Conference Date
Organized by World Business Institute
Rome, Italy
1st - 4th of September 2012
East-Meets-West on Innovation and Entrepreneurship
Organized by the European Office of Cyprus
Nicosia, Cyprus
11th - 12th of September 2012
4th Annual Open Innovation Summit
Organized by WRG Marketing & Innovation Network
Chicago, USA
12th - 14th of September 2012
Clean Energy Expo Asia
Organized by Koelnmesse and ADB-Asian Development Bank (INSME Member)
Bangkok, Thailand
13th - 14th of September 2012
EU-China Business & Technology Cooperation Fair VI
Co-organized by EUPIC and by the EU Project Innovation Centre
Chengdu, China
13th - 15th of September 2012
Baltic Dynamics 2012
Organized by KTU Regional Science Park (KTC), Kaunas Regional Innovation Centre, Kaunas University of Technology (KTU), the Ministry of Economy and the Baltic Association of Science/Technology Parks and Innovation Centers (BASTIC)
Vilnius, Lithuania
16th - 18th of September 2012
Continuous Innovation Across Boundaries
Organized by CINet - Continuous Innovation Network
Rome, Italy
18th - 19th of September 2012
9th Annual Conference of The Technopolicy Network "Instruments for Shaping a Knowledge Region - Interregional and International Collaboration in Science Based Regional Development"
Organized by The Technopolicy Network
Leuven & Genk, Belgium
19th - 20th of September 2012
AURP 2012 International Conference
Organized by AURP - Association of University Research Parks and hosted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison University Research Park
Madison, Wisconsin, United States
19th - 20th of September 2012
ICIC 2012 “Challenges of Innovation Clusters in an Era of Economic Uncertainty”
Organized by INNOPOLIS Foundation
Daedeok, South Korea
19th – 21st of September 2012
The 2nd Innovation for Financial Services Summit
Organized by the Public Research Centre Henri Tudor in partnership with ISPIM - International Society for Professional Innovation Management (INSME Member)
Luxembourg, Grand-Duchy of Luxembourg
4th - 6th of October 2012
Internet as Innovation Eco-System Summit 2012
Organized by European Alliance for Innovation (INSME Member)
Riva del Garda, Trento, Italy
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recipients who are involved or interested in INSME. Via della Scrofa 117 00186 Rome, Italy Phone: +39 06-68806803 E-mail: secretariat@insme.it Join us on |
The biannual WTA General Assembly reviews the major policies and business activities of the World Technopolis Association-WTA (INSME Member). It consists in three days of conferences, symposia and workshops and a number of accompanying events, during which participants will be able to meet people who today create the history of the future. Other WTA meeting such as the Mayors Forum, the University President Forum and the Executive Board Meeting will be held in conjunction with the General Assembly.
15th - 18th of September 2012
