Speakers

David Charles is professor of Enterprise and Innovation at Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University, and director of the Northumbria Centre for Innovation, Regional Transformation and Entrepreneurship (iNCITE).  David’s research experience encompasses university engagement with business and communities, regional innovation policy, innovative clusters, innovation management, and urban competitiveness. David has led or been a co-investigator on around 80 projects, funded by the European Commission, UK government, ESRC, OECD and other national and regional bodies. David has undertaken a variety of studies of universities regional impact and engagement and developed a suite of metrics and indicators used annually now by the UK to measure the engagement of universities with business and the community. He is currently participating in an EU Marie Curie Innovative Training Network on The Role of Universities in Regional Innovation (RUNIN).

As the innovation director of Tampere University Dr. Taru Pilvi is responsible for the development of innovation culture in a new multidisciplinary university. In addition to the development of innovation culture her responsibilities include the leadership of Sustainable Development action plan and Internationalisation road map of Tampre University. Taru’s academic background is in nutrition and obesity research but her career is a mixture of industry-academia collaboration, corporate innovation leadership and sustainable and socially responsible startup life.

Dr. Pilvi’s main task as innovation director is to foster and grow the entrepreneurial spirit inside the university and to steer the innovation activities towards sustainable future. This requires coordinated interaction and inspiration between university, industry, public sector and startup ecosystem stakeholders.

Dr. Berbenni-Rehm is Advisory Board’s member of AI & Society, Springer Editors; co-founder of the ‘European Entrepreneurial Regions Initiative’ taken up by the Committee of the Regions, Brussels; past vice-chair of the EU Commission’s High Level Advisory Group for DG Research for SMEs during FP7. She is a recognised international thought leader and keynote speaker with 13 international peer reviewed publications.

Dr. Berbenni-Rehm is known for her high ability to understand and simplify complex inter-disciplinary processes, and has more than 25 years’ experience in Knowledge and Technology Transfer, Deployment and Rollout of R&D+I results.

Formerly Reader in Comparative Business Development at South Bank Business School, Senior Lecturer in International Business Strategy at the University of Surrey and visiting academic at Canterbury Business School, The University of Kent, Prof. Todeva has worked in the fields of International Business Strategy, Globalisation and Sustainable Development Goals, Organisation theory, Behaviouralism, Institutionalism, Co-evolution theory.

She has published research on cluster mapping and internationalisation, global value chains, governance of innovation, strategic alliances and intermediation, regional innovation systems and multistakeholder coalitions, the restructuring of business networks in transition economies and value chains in the global health care. Her book on ‘Business Networks: Strategy and Structure’ has received a wide popularity among academics and business practitioners.

Prof. Emanuela Todeva, is now directing the BCNED research centre on Business Clusters, Networks and Economic Development. She is also an Advisor and Consultant to the European Commission, Institute of Prospective Technologies with commissioned work on the evaluation of National Innovation Systems, Mapping of Global Value Chains, Implementation of Smart Specialisation Strategies and Cluster Internationalisation.