How to improve strategies together – EmpInno partners meet in Tartu, EE
On the 20-21 February 2018, the Tartu Science Park and the Tartu City Government organised the 7th meeting of the EmpInno project in Tartu, Estonia. All EmpInno partners from across the Baltic Sea Region were invited to the SPARK Demo Center to exchange their experiences on implementing the RIS3 in their region. After an introduction by the hosts and a status-quo report of the overall project, the project partners discussed of how RIS3 are communicated within different organizational settings. While Rostock Business and Lubelskie Voivodeship presented two different approaches to communicate Smart Specialisation Strategies within their own organisations, examples of how the RIS3 implementation is fed back to policy owners were given and discussed by four different partner regions. Two intensive working sessions on both meeting days covered the further development of relevant project outputs, namely the Synergy and Empowerment concept and the composition of recommendations for strategy owners and innovation intermediaries regarding successful strategies to implement and communicate respective RIS3 within their regions. Input of different roles and functions of RIS3 strategies as a regional innovation policy instrument was given by Jari Kohlemainen, University of Tampere, to inspire the discussion.
To frame the thematic focus of EmpInno and to give new impulses to the participants regarding the implementation and maintenance of RIS3-related organisational structures, presentations of RIS3 implementation processes were given by the Business Advisory Services Estonia for Southern Estonia and by the Region Gävleborg for Gävleborg County. A guided tour through the SPARK Demo Center, a study visit to Estonian Genome Center at the University of Tartu and three presentations of relevant initiatives in Tartu regarding the support of business development - ADAPTER , Tartu Biotechnology Park, European Space Agency incubation centre - completed the program.
Picture: By Pimpampoum - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0 ee, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21619768