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Stimulating entrepreneurshipand support to spin-offs
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On October 5th 2004, an international conference took place to discuss the PANEL regions’ benchmarking reports on initiatives to encourage entrepreneurial spirit and academic spin-offs.
Luigi Vimercati, Councillor for Economic Development and Innovation, Province of Milan, highlighted the role of PANEL as a European model of regional development. Astrid Severin, Project Officer of DG Enterprise, focused on the EU’s expectations of networks such as PANEL in the transfer of best practices. Mateu Hernández, CEO of Barcelona Activa, presented PANEL’s best practice report on “Motivating people towards entrepreneurship”. His conclusion was that entrepreneurship can be learned, be it through primary and secondary-level education, programmes directed towards women wishing to reintegrate the workplace, or by improving the skills of new entrepreneurs.
The afternoon session, moderated by Giorgio Monaci (Director of the Economic Activities Department of the Province of Milan), included the report on “University support to entrepreneurship” by Sergio Campodall’Orto (CEO, Politecnico Innovazione Milan). Conclusions examined the wide variety of national and local legal frameworks for spin-offs, the administrative bodies strongly committed to entrepreneurship support and the high number of overlapping measures within the regions. The lecture ended with recommendations to policy makers. In further round table discussions, young entrepreneurs from Barcelona, Dublin, Milan and Munich compared personal experiences with regional support measures and obstacles encountered along their entrepreneurial route. The President of the Province of Milan, Filippo Penati, announced that Milan’s first “Day of the Entrepreneur” will take place in 2005.
Conference presentations and copies of reports can be downloaded here  |
