Keynote Speakers
Jiří Blažek
Jane Davies
Manuel Heitor
Gerd Kortuem
Yevgeny Kuznetsov
Massimo Monteleone
Juan Sanchez
Charles Wessner
Jiří Blažek
Smart specialisation - opportunities and challenges in less developed regions
Associate Professor at the Department of Social Geography and Regional Geography, Charles University in Prague. Main research interests are formation of regional innovation systems in new member states, the geography of knowledge sources, analysis of regional impacts of sectoral policies and evaluation of the impacts of the EU cohesion policy. Author of about 50 scientific papers on regional development and policy.
Jiří has more than 20 years of professional expertise in the sphere of regional development and policy. He provided consultancy services to a number of international firms and organization (e.g. ECORYS, CSIL, GDSI, World Bank, EPRC, APPLICA). He was member of Policy Advisory Unit and later of the Task Force at the Ministry for Regional Development of The Czech Republic where he provided consultation services in the sphere of EU cohesion policy. In 2004-2006 he was member of senior expert group on “Constructing Regional Advantage” (DG RESEARCH). Currently he provides consultation services to the Czech Ministry for Regional Development, to Czech Ministry of Education and to several regional development bodies. He participated in about a dozen of evaluation projects (ex-ante, mid-term, ex-post) for both European Commission and for the Czech government. He was the national coordinator of several international research projects (FP7, European Science Foundation). Currently, he acts as a national coordinator of international FP7 research project “Smart specialisation for regional innovation” and of “Cluster life cycles – the role of actors, networks and institutions in emerging, growing, declining and renewing clusters” EUROCORES, Grant Agency of the Czech Republic.
Jane Davies
Connecting the Corridor, Manchester
Jane was Chief Executive of Manchester Science Parks (msp) from 2000-12. She was on the Board of the UK Science Parks Association from 2004-09 and its Chairman from 2007. She also served on the board of the International Association of Science Parks (IASP), and was President of its Advisory Council from 2009-13. Since 2013 she has been a non-executive director of the Northern Ireland Science Park in Belfast.
In her time at msp, the importance of the science park and its tenants to the economic success of the city region became widely acknowledged and its international profile grew significantly. Consequently, Jane was appointed to the boards of several economic development agencies in Manchester, including the Corridor Partnership which was formed to leverage the activities of two universities and their associated research hospitals, and was chairman of the Manchester Innovation Group which had oversight of all innovation activities in the city region.
Jane has a degree in chemistry from St Anne’s College, Oxford and joined BP Chemicals on graduation. She spent 18 years with BP in a range of roles including two years on secondment to the Foreign Office, and on leaving BP, ran the Buxton Opera Festival for four years.
She now works as an independent consultant, applying her expertise in the development and management of science parks and the contribution of innovation to economic activity. She is a Companion Member (honorary) of UKSPA and received her OBE in 2010 for services to innovation.
Manuel Heitor
What has changed in Europe after the European Research Area in times of increased uncertainty? - Challenges and opportunities for science, technology and education policy
Manuel Heitor is Full Professor at Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon, and director of the Center for Innovation, Technology and Policy Research, IN+, which was awarded in 2005 by the International Association of Management of Technology, IAMOT, has one of the top 50 global centres of research on “Management of Technology”. From March 2005 to June 2011 he served as Secretary of State for Science, Technology and Higher Education in the Government of Portugal. Most recently, in the 2011-12 academic year, he was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard.
He earned a PhD at Imperial College, London, in 1985 in combustion research and did post-doctoral training at the University of California San Diego. Then he pursued an academic career at Técnico, Lisbon, where he served as Deputy-President for the period 1993-1998. Since 1995, he has been Research Fellow of the IC2 Institute of the University of Texas at Austin. He was co-editor of the book series on “Technology Policy and Innovation”, launched through Greenwood Publishers, Connecticut and continued through Purdue University Press. He was co-founder in 2002 of “Globelics - the global network for the economics of learning, innovation, and competence building systems” and, in 2004, a founding member of the S&T Council of the “International Risk Governance Council”, IRGC. He is member of the Portuguese Engineering Academy and a foreign member of the Spanish Royal Academy of Engineering and the Serbian Academy of Sciences. In 2003 he was awarded with the Dibner Award of the Society for the History of Technology, SHOT.
His current research interests and main publications are in the area of science, technology and higher education policy, management of technology and the development of innovation policies. He is currently involved in several initiatives in the areas of knowledge for development and risk governance. He chairs the academic network “International Risk Governance Council - Portugal”, IRGC-Portugal, and heads the doctoral Program on “Engineering and Public Policy, EPP” at Técnico, Lisbon.
Gerd Kortuem
Tackling Economic Growth Barriers with Smart City Initiatives
Gerd Kortuem is Professor of Computing at The Open University and Director of the Ubiquitous Computing & Sustainability Lab.
His research focuses on the design of digital technologies for tackling key societal issues in areas such as energy, transportation, health, and education, and covers digital cities, urban data mining, the Internet of Things, human computer Interaction and wearable computing.
He currently runs research projects on smart energy, intelligent transport and smart education with BT, E.On, Intel, INRIA and others. His most recent research project is MK:Smart, a £16M Milton Keynes-based smart city project (www.mksmart.org), where he leads the smart energy, citizen innovation and education work streams.
Prof Kortuem is involved in the Milton Keynes Low Carbon Living Programme, acts as mentor to several software and Internet of Things start-ups, and has been teaching software entrepreneurship at Lancaster University and Saïd Business School, Oxford University. He can be found online at www.kortuem.com.
Yevgeny Kuznetsov
How is country's talent abroad co-create changes in national innovation system? Evidence for a new policy agenda
Yevgeny Kuznetsov is Senior Research Fellow, Migration Policy Institute (a global think tank in Washington, DC) and Deputy Director of Center for Research and Industrial Policy at SkolTech (a part of MIT family in Moscow).
He has been working on innovation, growth and talent mobility issues for 17 years in the World Bank which he joined in 1995 from Brookings Institution. He has acquired a unique perspective on reforms which blends insights of a practitioner (operational support to innovation projects in India, China, Vietnam, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Iran, Armenia, Tanzania, Morocco, Colombia and other economies) and a scholar (more than 30 articles and books on innovation and knowledge-based growth). In recent years, he also focuses on diasporas of highly skilled as change agents to promote institutional development in home countries and has published two books and articles on that issue.
His recent book “How Can Talent Abroad Induce Development at Home? Towards a Pragmatic Diaspora Agenda” brings together innovation and international mobility of talent perspectives.
Massimo Monteleone
Unlocking and developing research potentials: regional implications
Massimo Monteleone, is professor of "Crop Ecology" and "Environmental and Territorial Agronomy" at the Department of Agriculture, Food and Environment of the University of Foggia (Italy). The unifying concept of “bioeconomy” is particularly useful to largely portray his scientific interest. In his research, non-food crops, crop residues, by-products and waste, together with alternative cultivations (such as algae) are considered for industrial and energy applications. The optimization of the whole value chain is targeted to build up a strategy to reconcile bio-based productions with the ecological harmony and the cultural heritage of the most relevant rural areas of Southern Europe.
At present, he is coordinating the European FP7 project “STAR*AgroEnergy” that strives to work out an integrated approach to renewable energy generation and knowledge-based economy according to sustainability criteria. In the frame of this project, an interdisciplinary research team was born and is actively growing, establishing strong connections both at regional and European level. His current research interests include crop ecology; environmental analysis; agro-ecosystem and energy planning; biomass, bioenergy and bio-materials; crop irrigation and soil salinization. Until 2013 he was coordinator of the Ph.D. course on "Rural Land and Sustainable Agro-systems", deputy coordinator of the Ph.D. school on “Environment & Landscapes” at the University of Foggia and coordinator of the Master degree in Agriculture at the same University.
Juan Sanchez
Research Centers and their Development at the University of Texas
Dr. Juan M. Sanchez is the Vice President for Research at The University of Texas at Austin and holder of the Temple Foundation Endowed Professorship #4 in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. He obtained his B.S.in Physics at the University of Cordoba, Argentina, 1971; M.S. in Materials Science, 1974; and Ph.D. in Materials Science, 1977 at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Dr. Sanchez is the author and co-author of over 140 technical publications on a wide range of topics in materials science and engineering. His current research interests are in the electronic, thermodynamic and structural properties of materials including intermetallic compounds, magnetic and non-magnetic alloys, thin films and magnetic multilayers. Primary interest is the development and application of first principles computational methods for the construction of phase diagrams of multicomponent material systems. Other research interests include the development of laser-controlled selective chemical vapor deposition processes for metals, alloys and ceramics.
Dr. Sanchez serves as a Representative to the Government-University-Industry Research Roundtable of the National Academies, member of the Committee on Science, Engineering and Public Policy of AAAS, and member of the Advisory Council of the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health. Dr. Sanchez is past member and Chair of the Visiting Committee for Advanced Technology of NIST, and a past member of the Board of Visitors of the US Army War College.
Charles Wessner
U.S. Best Practices in Regional Policies for Innovation
Charles Wessner is a National Academies scholar and a powerful advocate of effective innovation policies. As the founder and Director of the National Academy of Sciences Technology, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship Program, he is recognized nationally and internationally for his expertise on innovation policy, including public-private partnerships, entrepreneurship, early-stage financing for new firms, and the special needs and benefits of high-technology industry. As an outgrowth of his work with the U.S. government, he advises technology agencies, government ministries, and the Prime Ministers of countries in Europe and Asia. In addition, he cooperates closely with international organizations and lectures at major universities in the U.S. and abroad. The overarching goal of his work is to develop a better understanding of how we can bring new technologies forward to address global challenges in health, climate, energy, water, infrastructure, and security. Reflecting his commitment to international cooperation, he was recently nominated as an Officer of the Order of Merit by the President of the Republic of France.
