NEWS
Inaugural One-Day Local Dissemination Workshop FRIDA Catania Unit
17 June 2009
The Inaugural Local Dissemination Workshop of the FRIDA project will be convened on Wednesday 17th June 2009 by the School of Economics and Business and the Department “Impresa, Culture e Società” of the University of Catania.
The University of Catania is one of the seven units which promote the FRIDA project. FRIDA is a two year Europe-wide research project specifically targeted at fostering regional innovation and development through anchors and networks, which has managed to receive good funding by the European Commission- Socio-Economic Sciences and the Humanities Part 8- Collaborative Project (FP7-SSH-2007-1).
The project’s ultimate aim is to enhance regional policy making within the EU, by advancing stateof- the art understanding of the importance of anchor firms and networks to regional development and cohesion. Anchor firms are known to be increasingly important to regional development as entrepreneurial firms and multinational enterprises increasingly restructure and relocate in response
to the pressures of globalization and of the multiple “glocal” tensions. The project started out in January 2009 and is expected to end in December 2010.
The seven main partners of the FRIDA project are the ones that follow: University of Bologna, Italy; University of Kaiserslautern, Germany; Science and Technology Policy Research, UK; University of Katowice Poland; Grenoble Applied Economics Laboratory, France, University of Catania, Italy; and the National Technical University of Ukraine, in Kiev Ukraine.
The Local Dissemination Workshop “Fostering Regional Innovation and Development Through Anchors and Networks in the Catania Area” is explicitly ideated and designed for attracting a composite audience originally blending the stances of business, academia and the policy-making community. The one-day workshop is the opening one of the FRIDA-Catania series that endeavours to add new insights and ignite sparkling debate on the crucial issue of regional development by innovation efforts. This aim will be actively pursued by presenting the relevant objectives of the FRIDA project, by discussing the results achieved in the first semester by the Catania unit and, as well, by exploring how the regional actors can systemically contribute to improve the local innovation process.
To address the issues above in a highly systematic manner, the workshop presenters are expected to focus on the main questions that the FRIDA project is intended to disentangle in relation to the key player in the area and main FRIDA partner: STMicroelectronics. The workshop event is a great opportunity to bring together at length all the major local institutional stakeholders, both public and private, who share highly idiosyncratic interest to develop the regional innovation system of the Catania area by means of knowledge combination and creation and technological innovation.
More info:
http://www.fridaproject.eu/docup/invito2ante.pdf