Second Inno-Deal Transregional Workshop

The First Transregional Inno-Deal Workshop was held in Vienna on 10 and 11 April 2008, and witnessed the participation of over 60 experts and practitioners from 12 European regions, concentrated on the identification of new opportunities and mutual schemes to design common actions addressing the needs of participating programme managers.

Unlike other purely research-oriented initiatives, the aim of INNO-DEAL Transregional Networking Workshops is to examine challenges and identify solutions for improved and better practices as well as to initiate transregional cooperation activities.

Project Inno-Deal has currently earmarked five schemes as the most promising best practices to pursue. These will be used as models to launch Inno-Deal’s Mentoring Actions, mutual learning sessions in which the managers of successful programmes will explain the key features and ideas behind their initiatives.

Each mentoring action will address a workgroup including the mentor and 12 mentees, the interested programme managers. The final goal of the five mentoring action workshops is to exchange ideas on how to spread the explicit and tacit knowledge of these best practices, how to improve the effectiveness of innovation financing and, eventually, how to interconnect regional schemes.

This exercise will be fundamental not only for the managers of other schemes in other regions, but also for the mentors presenting the successful schemes. They will be able to strengthen their excellence by analysing how their methods could be employed in different scenarios. This mentoring approach, based on mutual learning, will also allow participants to overcome the dated approach according to which a good scheme can simply be replicated in a different context.

In fact, Project Officer Alex Talacchi has drawn attention to the fact that programme transfer is an outdated and inefficient modus operandi. A new and more efficient trend requires that state-of-the-art know-how and solutions be embedded directly into local measures, avoiding the forced adaptation of extraneous solutions.

Indeed, this approach should be used with the recent accession countries, according to Mr Talacchi. Fundamentally, the objective is to adapt, rather than mechanically transfer, knowledge from long-standing EU Member States in the definition of new schemes.

This is where the Rome workshop will pick up the ball. Mentoring Actions will provide all programme managers with an in-depth understanding of the mechanisms that have allowed the fruitful operation of regional best practices, and discussions will be conducted on how to avoid the linear transfer of programmes amongst different realities.

The Innodeal Transregional Workshop Parallel and Plenary Sessions

The Second Inno-Deal Transregional Workshop will be held at the Duke Hotel in Rome, Italy (13-15 October 2008).

Day One (October 13): the morning will be dedicated to parallel sessions for each scheme. Each session will be followed by a Rapporteur who will prepare a report for the following day’s plenary session. An open round table on how to map common problems and solutions will be held in the afternoon.

Day Two (October 14): this day will be dedicated to a plenary session addressing all five schemes. Presentations will be made on the previous day’s parallel sessions and the plenary session will be closed by a discussion and conclusions on the identified common problems and solutions.