DATE / TIME:

2015•11•11    11:30 - 12:30

Location:

Guimarães

Abstract

Despite the assumption that large cities produce a higher number of innovations than intermediate and small cities, there is a growing evidence showing that public policies favoring urban innovation and the use of digital technology to open new pathways to innovation are more important than the city size. The seminar will introduce diverse approaches to productive digital innovation, including living labs, citizen science, innovation districts, and other socio-technical processes that utilize digital technology for building digital products and services and deploying them in the urban context. It will also present possible innovation-promoting policy instruments including public-private initiatives, innovation-friendly regulations, systems of incentives, and local innovation environments, such as local universities collaborating with enterprises and local governments through IT parks. The presentation will be illustrated with a comparison among three Argentinian cities of diverse sizes that host innovative universities and IT parks – La Plata, Bahia Blanca, and Tandil – including the outcomes of innovation-friendly policies employed by these cities between 2003 and 2015.

Speaker

Susana Finquelievich was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She holds a degree in Architecture from the National University of Rosario, Argentina (1973), a Post Graduate Course on Urban and Regional Planning by the Polytechnic University, Poland (1976), a Master in Urbanism  by the Université Paris VIII, France (1977), and a PhD in Social Sciences by the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, France (1980). Her current positions include Principal Researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research in Argentina, Director of the Research Program on Information Society, Institute Gino Germani, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Buenos Aires, coordinator of the Habitat, Environmental Sciences and Sustainability Commission at CONICET, professor at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism, University of Rosario, Argentina, and at the Faculty of Education, National University of Entre Rios, Argentina. Susana is also a consultant for UNESCO and is fluent in Spanish, English, French, Italian and Portuguese. Her latest book is titled “Innovación Abierta en la Sociedad del Conocimiento: Redes Transnacionales y Comunidades Locales” (Buenos Aires, 2014).