Issue N° 117 - January 2014
Keep up to date on innovation matters worldwide with the INSME Association!
Dear INSMEnews Readers,
welcome to the first INSMEnews edition in 2014!
The beginning of another year with positive spirit and focus on innovation for sustainable growth!
I invite you to join us at the upcoming 10th INSME Annual Meeting at Abu Dhabi/UAE.
Together with the colleagues from the INSME Secretariat we started the countdown to another milestone in the INSME Annual Meeting Success Story!
Enjoy the vast offer of networking opportunities with high-level speakers, outstanding keynote speakers and expert panelists as well as the innovation Tour to Masdar City and the international training session!
Keep in touch and be part of it!
And now - as usual - my quote of the month for further brainstorming!
God gave time to people but he didn't say anything about haste
(Amrilkais)
We welcome contributions, comments and suggestions to furthermore enrich this newsletter and improve our ongoing work, with the aim to support innovation intermediaries, their networking and internationalisation so as to better reach SMEs worldwide and help them to remain competitive on an international scale.
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).
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...and now as usual enjoy your reading!
Ms. Christin Pfeiffer
INSME Secretary General
Supporting organisations:
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The 10th INSME Annual Meeting on “Investing in Innovation: Building a Sustainable Knowledge - based Economy” will take place from the 18th to the 20th of March 2014 at Abu Dhabi in collaboration with Khalifa Fund for Enterprise Development (INSME Member).
The agenda of the international Conference has been finalized and national and international high-level speakers have confirmed their participation. Participants will get the exclusive opportunity to meet and exchange ideas with speakers as well as key players in the innovation ecosystem, via diverse networking and match-making initiatives to be held during the Annual Meeting. In addition, on the 20th of March participants will get the chance to participate in the Innovation Tour to Masdar City and broaden their knowledge thanks to an International Expert Training that this year will focus on “Sustainability, Innovation and Design”, “Commercialization of Research” and “Tricks and Tips on Creative Communication”.
BE PART of the upcoming 10th INSME Annual Meeting by registering through www.2014.insme.org.
The INSME Secretariat is also available to answer your questions at 2014@insme.it.
In this interview INSME President, Mr. Di Anselmo, speaks about the important milestones reached by the Association up to now, the forthcoming 10th INSME Annual Meeting and shares with the readers his future vision of the Association.
Mr. Di Anselmo expresses his firm belief that progress is achievable only by turning knowledge into novel products and services. The 10th INSME Annual Meeting will represent the perfect opportunity to accomplish this goal by focusing on themes such as Investing in Young Talents and Innovation among others. Mr. Di Anselmo states that these themes are of crucial importance by being the only way to give the next generation the opportunity to act in an entrepreneurial way and make changes possible and thus generate wealth and jobs.
Read the whole interview here.
INSME is delighted to announce a new Full Member joining the network in January!
The Centennial Fund is a Saudi Arabian charity established in July 2004 with a royal charter to help young Saudi men & women achieve financial independence by helping them start their own commercially successful businesses.
The main principles that guide the Centennial Fund’s activities can be summarized in four main pillars:
Read more about the Centennial Fund here.
The INSME Association can currently count on the support of 97 Members from 43 different countries.
The OECD (INSME moral Sponsor) and the World Bank recently launched the Innovation Policy Platform (IPP), a new web-based interactive space that supports policy makers, analysts, International organizations, non-governmental stakeholders in the innovation policy-making process, by providing them with an online repository which aims at facilitating collective learning about innovation policy, both conceptual and how-to aspects, tailored to the needs of developing and developed countries.
In particular the IPP targets a variety of users by trying to meet their functional and informational needs, such as:
For more details visit the official webpage.
EURADA (INSME Member) is one of the partners of BENISI, a trans-European consortium that brings together 12 organizations from 7 different countries. BENISI seeks to build a European-wide network of networks of incubators for social innovation. The project will identify and highlight 300 social innovation enterprises, which will ensure new specific solutions to societal needs and impact on society's capacity to innovate.
In the framework of the BENISI Project, EURADA has been asked to identify 30 to 50 practices in the field of social innovation in order to assess if they could be transferred to other regions and other stakeholders.
Therefore EURADA invites relevant stakeholders to point out practices in all fields of social innovations, which are worth scanning. The promoters of these social innovations might even become coaches for other aspiring social entrepreneurs.
To learn more about the BENISI consortium visit the webpage.
On the 19th and 20th of December 2013 the MED Confederation was launched in Barcelona, with the aim of promoting economic and social cooperation in Mediterranean basin.
The newly created Alliance brings together nine financial institutions from Belgium, Egypt, France, Morocco, Tunisia and Turkey which are intended to facilitate regional cooperation and development of synergies with existing institutions and Euro-Med cooperation frameworks, with particular focus on civil society.
The Union for Mediterranean Secretariat supports this new initiative and will involve the MED Confederation as a key partner in the implementation of regional cooperation projects focused on sustainable development, job creation, exchange of knowledge and innovation.
More information here.
The UK Government recently launched the Smart Cities Forum aimed at putting together the best minds and energies from both the public and private sector in order to transform UK in the smart cities world leader.
The forum, co-chaired by Universities and Science Minister David Millets and Cities Minister Greg Clark, will meet on a regular basis to establish a plan to exploit new technologies and build smarter and more forward looking cities.
Through the Technology Strategy Board (TSB), the UK Government is already investing 50 £ million in a Future Cities Catapult in London that will support companies that want to commercialize new technologies.
Glasgow is the city in which the TSB is investing 24 £ million to demonstrate how new technologies in sectors such as healthcare and transport might be useful for economy as well as for the quality of life.
Learn more about the initiative here.
In this article Per Werngren, owner and CEO of Idenet AD, underlines the importance of SMEs in the European recovery and highlights that the adoption of new technologies is the “business X factor”.
Nevertheless there are a lot of barriers to technology adoption and it is fundamental for European growth that policy makers and entrepreneurs act together to remove these barriers through a clear regulatory framework.
Read the full article here.
As in baseball for innovators too, there is a major league and a minor one, this is Jeffrey Philips’ opinion in the first 2014 article published in the blog Innovation on purpose.
According to the author, there are some key differences that distinguish the major and the minor league of innovation:
Learn more about it here
The Centannial Fund (INSME Member) recently launched the Prince Abdulaziz bin Abdullah Global Entrepreneurship Award with the aim of encouraging worldwide projects and creative ideas and recognizing mentors who play a substantial role in supporting entrepreneurship.
The Prize consists of six main categories:
and the award sum is equivalent to $270,000 USD. All logistic costs (including transportation, ticket, and hotel accommodations) for the winners to collect their respective prizes will be fully covered by the Prize.
The deadline for application is the 30th of March 2014.
Further information are available here.
The European Commission invites to submit proposals for the “Enhancing SME Innovation Capacity by Providing Better Innovation Support” call.
In the framework of the Horizon 2020 Programme, the specific objective of the action is to create the conditions for a comprehensive and consistent conception of a coaching and mentoring service delivered during the company’s participation in the instrument.
The coaching and mentoring will be provided by a network of appropriately trained and experienced business practitioners. It will be delivered in cooperation with the Enterprise Europe Network which will initiate, broker and monitor the coach-SME relationship as well as provide participating companies with access to the wider Network service offering.
The total call budget is € 760,000 and the deadline for submission is the 12th of March 2014.
Read more about the call here.
The Science of Science & Innovation Policy (SciSIP) program supports research designed to advance the scientific basis of science and innovation policy. Research funded by the program thus develops, improves and expands models, analytical tools, data and metrics that can be applied in the science policy decision making process. For example, research proposals may develop behavioral and analytical conceptualizations, frameworks or models that have applications across a broad array of SciSIP challenges, including the relationship between broader participation and innovation or creativity.
The SciSIP program invites the participation of researchers from all of the social, behavioral and economic sciences as well as those working in domain-specific applications such as chemistry, biology, physics, or nanotechnology. The program welcomes proposals for individual or multi-investigator research projects, doctoral dissertation improvement awards, conferences, workshops, symposia, experimental research, data collection and dissemination, computer equipment and other instrumentation, and research experience for undergraduates. The program places a high priority on interdisciplinary research as well as international collaboration.
The estimated total program funding is $ 8,000,000 and the deadline for submitting proposals is the 9th of September 2014.
Read more about the initiative here.
Dell’s Pay it Forward initiative aims at positively impact the future of women’s entrepreneurship. The campaign works on the premise that if someone helps a woman business owner advance - and that woman, in turn, supports another - then it is possible to create a global community of women supporting women so that the initial efforts can be greatly amplified. The movement provides you with an opportunity to “pay it forward” by logging a gesture on the site. A gesture is an act that creates a positive impact in a woman’s life. Gestures can be time spent mentoring, providing professional guidance or contributing monetarily. The initiative intends to track support for 1 Million women entrepreneurs by the end of 2015.
Learn more about the initiative and how to log a gesture on the following link.
The European Commission recently released a new report on ”A Recovery on the Horizon? Annual Report on European SMEs” which aims at providing an overview of the current status of European SMEs, their structure, their contribution to employment and to the wealth of the European Union and, secondly, at analyzing how and to what extent SMEs are recovering from the economic crisis and what the outlook is for the SME sector in the future.
According to the report, European SMEs are recording growth in real value added. The forecasts for the next two years indicate that SMEs in the services sector as well as in the manufacturing one will continue to grow in terms of employment and value added. It is also worth noting that the consequences of the crisis were not distributed homogenously and the trends are diverse amongst EU Member States. The research has shown that SMEs in countries with sound structural characteristics have withstood the hardship of the crisis relatively better and are expected to recover more quickly in comparison to other groups of countries.
Read the full report here.
The World Economic Forum Investors Industries issued a report on “From Ideas to Practice, Pilots to Strategy - Practical Solutions and Actionable Insights on how to Do Impact Investing” which is an attempt to disseminate the best practices and lessons learned from the first movers, early adopters and bold innovators in the field of impact investing, with the goal of further advancing the sector.
With the term "Impact Investment" the authors mean an investment approach that intentionally seeks to create both financial return and positive social or environmental impact that is actively measured. Divided into four main sections, the report contains lessons learned from practitioner’s experience, and showcases best practices, organizational structures and innovative instruments that asset owners, asset managers, financial institutions and impact investors have successfully implemented. It is important to notice that according to the report, partnership is critical for success. Successful impact investing fund managers share four qualities: partnering effectively with the public sector, using catalytic capital, providing "multilingual" (i.e. cross-sector) leadership, and placing financial and social objectives on equal standing.
Read the report here.
The Innovator’s Accelerator is a six weeks learning programme to be held at lunch-time, intended to show how the world's most renowned brands have succeeded through innovation. The content is engaging and interactive, with plenty of peer-to-peer inspiration-and competition.
In just six weeks, your team might:
Learn more about the programme here.
The MIRRIS (Mobilising Institutional Reforms in Research and Innovation Systems) aims at encouraging a better exploitation of European research and innovation programmes and participation in the European Research Area of the 12 target countries.
The MIRRIS Newsletter provides information on the key challenges that MIRRIS is addressing, as well as other related events and activities. Each newsletter includes an interview with one of the stakeholders involved in the policy dialogues or with a project partner. The last section of the newsletter is dedicated to events that are taking place in the target countries on Horizon 2020 and other research-related issues.
Learn more about the MIRRIS Project and read the complete newsletter here.
The 1st Euro-Mediterranean Brokerage Event on Research and Innovation
In the framework of the Mediterranean Science, Policy, Research and Innovation Gateway “MedSpring”, the event has the objective to encourage and strengthen the European cooperation on research and innovation by identifying three main challenges:
The two-days event targets companies, organizations, entrepreneurs and researchers with the aim of networking and finding potential collaborators and partners.
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20th of February 2014
The 12th Annual European Financial Services Conference
Organized by Forum Europe
Brussels, Belgium
23rd - 25th of February 2014
2014 EFMD Entrepreneurship Education Conference
Organized by the European Foundation for Management Development - EFMD
Boston, USA
3rd - 5th of March 2014
Hamdan Bin Mohammad e-University (HBMeU) Congress 2014
Organized by Hamdan Bin Mohammed e-University
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
5th - 6th of March 2014
The 4th annual Africa Banking and Finance Conference
Organized by Aidem Business Solution
Nairobi, Kenya
10th - 11th of March 2014
Innovation Convention 2014
Organized by the European Commission
Brussels, Belgium
13th of March 2014
Innovating Method: Researching Gender and Entrepreneurship
Organized by the Institute for Small Business and Entrepreneurship (ISBE)
Belfast, United Kingdom
9th - 10th of April 2014
Middle East Investment Conference
Organized by the CFA Institute
Dead Sea, Jordan
9th - 11th of April 2014
Industrial Technologies 2014
Organized by FORTH/ICE - HT, Spinvers Ltd, Sev Hellenic Federation of Enterprises, LMS at the University of Patras, SYROS'Shipibuilding and Industrial Enterprise S.A., FRIGOGLASS, CNR ITIA, The Chamber of Achaia and ATHENA RIC
Athens, Greece
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