The Week of Innovative Regions in Europe (WIRE) 2017: Socially responsible, creative and trusted regional innovation in digital era as the 8th European Commission’s annual event, was hosted by the Technical University of Košice (Slovakia) from 28th to 30th of June 2017.
The event was generously supported by the Directorate-General Research & Innovation and by Spreading Excellence and Widening Participation Programme. Actual topic of the event was the socially responsible, creative and trusted regional innovations in digital era.
The 2017 WIRE platform objective purpose was to enable its participants, relevant policy makers, national and regional authorities, knowledge institutions, and enterprises from all over Europe to have an in-depth dialogue on the importance of societal impact of digital innovations, role of creativity in innovation potential, as well as widening and participation calls and the EU funding programme beyond 2020 suggestions and so to stimulate socially responsible research and innovation of digitalization for regional development and understand its societal impact using synergies between different EU policies to support economic, social and territorial cohesion.
During the three conference days the speakers with their interesting speeches rose debate and opened questioning issues. WIRE 2017 has hosted several highly valued speakers and round table members from various organisations like Markku Markkula, Vazil Hudák, Andrés Barreneche, Magda De Carli, Stanislav Kmeť, Ján Turňa and many others. The main conference days were accompanied by many side events like field visits, workshops, open space presentations, visual and audio creative installations at the conference venue.
During the whole event several digital tools were used to foster the communication, networking and feedback management. A networking wearable device with an interconnected web application that dynamically recorded the participants’ opinions and so provided a visual support to connect various experts and stakeholders with similar interests during the event is just one of the examples.
According to interviewed speakers and participants the conference had outstanding feedback from all the participants. That is obviously a good start for the following event of WIRE 2018 that will be held in Austria Innsbruck.