Last week I’ve been in Guimarães (Portugal) for the European Living Labs Event. It has been a really intense week that didn’t leave me much time to blog. Anyway it was nice to keep in touch via Twitter with my subscribers and followers. (Thanks to all of you for the inspiring feedbacks!).

Among my favourites of the first day I would mention in session 1, ‘Policies for demand driven innovation’ by Esko Aho (Chairman of the Expert Group Finland) and ‘Lead Markets for Innovation’ by Ruud Smits (Department of Innovation Studies, Ultrecht University), both of them gave very interesting presentations on how to promote competitiveness through innovation. Also Olavi Luotonen (Information Society and Media Directorate-General, European Commission) did a good job in session 2 about open innovation eServices and Living Labs.

In session 3 I liked the perspectives of Veli-Pekka Niitamo(Mobility Research Director, Nokia Corp.) and Richard Straub (Advisor to the Chairman IBM Europe, Middle-East and Africa) about what is the added value of Living Labs for competitiveness.

Lots of inspiration and new interesting ideas coming from the parallel sessions of the second day, even if many of them were running at the same time so was a bit difficult to attend..anyway the overall organization of the event has been good, WiFi connection included (Thanks to Antonio for proxy support!).

The European Living Labs concept is up and running! I’ll keep posting about it in future too…

On day 3 I went to Porto with Jaakko Panula for another meeting with Jose Carlos Caldeira (Director of INESC Porto) that impressed me for 2 reasons: 1) the great projects they are doing in INESC Porto 2) One of the best dinners I’ ve ever had…Porto is an amazing city (Check the photo below).

So Jose thanks again for everything…and see you back in Finland!

Andrea

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