Europe INNOVA - Partnerships for better innovation support

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More than 150 participants from all over Europe attended The KIS Partnering Forum on 19 February in Brussels. The 1-day meeting, hosted by European Commission (DG Enterprise) under the KIS-IP initiative was the first in a series of three annual events that aim at facilitating networking and partnership between policy makers, contacts from academia, industry and investment and SMEs from the fields of knowledge intensive services.

In six company review sessions, international SMEs providing services in the sectors of renewable energies, ICT and satellite downstream applications, presented their activities to the audience. Designated expert reviewers from the various sectors reviewed these presentations in order to select the winner of the KIS Contest.

32 companies from 14 countries were selected to present at the Forum. 11 companies attended also the KIS Academy on the day before the Forum. Here they received valuable coaching to prepare their presentations for the next day.

"From my perspective, the event was very well organized with a wide variety of companies and ideas presenting. I was very impressed with the level of the presentations from the participating companies and some of the ideas were also intriguing to say the least! I was also impressed with the level of engagement of the formal panel on the day and the level of feedback they gave.

The previous workshop day was also extremely useful as the format and content of my presentation changed significantly over the day and I got some excellent feedback over the entire day from both the reviewers and my fellow presenters." John Power (CEO Risaris - The SOA Gateway)

In an interactive conference programme, three discussion sessions and two keynote speeches, tried to cover various issues on the very different situations regarding financing, processes and successful growth within knowledge intensive services.
Amongst others, speakers included Prof. Alan Barrell (University of Cambridge) (presentation available here), Prof. Colin Turner, Tiina Tanninen-Ahonen (Tekes), Dr. Jan Nylander (Innovationsbron), Wilbert Schaap (SenterNovem)...

A full list of participants can be downloaded here.