INCOBRA - Increasing International Science, Technology and Innovation Cooperation between Brazil and the European Union

Target Group: programme managers, head of units, decision makers at funding agencies
Host: FINEP
Date & Place: 19-21 June 2017, Rio de Janeiro
Length: 3 days  (starting on 19 June at 12:30 and ending on 21 June at 12:00)
Organizers: FFG, FINEP
Supporting Partners: FAPESP, CONFAP, SPI

Concept

State and federal innovation and research funding agencies are mainly responsible for implementing R&D&I programs in order to support business and academia in their related activities. Through these programmes, agencies address specific challenges of their research and innovation actors such as promoting excellence in research, collaboration between businesses and academia, technology transfer, commercialization, promoting human development, skills and competences, promoting start-ups, promoting the internationalization of research and innovation activities, etc.  However, how effective and efficient the agencies are in their innovation support programmes? In other words, what is the impact of their programmes in increasing the total innovation capacity of their country?  It is one of the biggest challenges of funding agencies across the globe. The training workshop will focus on the effective programming and instruments so the agencies can  respond to  needs and expectations of the research and innovation actors.  The area chosen for programming exercise will be industry-academia partnerships since it respond to both research and industry needs, by considering the following questions:

• How to strengthen collaboration in research and knowledge-sharing between industry and academia (universities and research organizations)?
• How to enhance industry input into curricula and educational practice?
• How to build a working, mutually-beneficial models of cooperation between industry and academia considering the national boundaries and framework conditions?
• How to improve capacity of international collaboration in industry-academia partnerships?

Scope & Content

The goal of this training workshop is to increase the effectiveness of the publicly funded innovation programmes to support industry-academia cooperation through the identification of needs and expectations from R&I entities and integrating them into the programming process. Within this context, the international cooperation among funding agencies, from bilateral to multilateral settings, will also be discussed separately.

 
In addition to interactive, hands on training format, some European and Brazilian examples will also be considered, promoting mutual learning from the participating agencies` experiences and developing  a set of good practices in innovation support programmes.

Participants

Due to diverse level of development of the funding Agencies in Brazil, the working group decided to focus the engagement efforts on the group of related federal (such as FINEP, CNPq, EMBRAPII) and a number of state agencies that present higher capacity and that have a reasonable or good level of maturity in industry-academia collaboration as well as in international cooperation. These agencies will be funded to attend the training camp. However, the workshop will be open to representatives from all funding agencies. The agencies not meeting such criteria can participate in the training camp by bearing their own travel and accommodation expenses. The targeted State Funding Agencies are those that have implemented the H2020 co-funding mechanism and others that are interested in taking part in it in the future.

Topics to be covered

Training will be a combination of short seminars and hands on training sessions. Seminar topics are:

• How innovation is supported at the European Member States: Common indicators
• Introduction to the Effective Programme Design: Main Characteristics
• How to attract quality proposals
• Some Good Practice Examples (Programmes) from Europe and from Brazil for industry-academia partnerships
• Effective Ways of International Cooperation among Agencies: From bilateral to multilateral cooperation schemes

Registration:

Training is open to state and federal funding agency representatives from all regions of Brazil. Only one funding agency representative from the above mentioned regions will receive travel support. Due to limited seats available, maximum 2 representatives from each agency (from all Brazil) may participate in the training.

The deadline for registration is June 12.

Representatives from other regions may participate in the training by bearing their own costs.

Please click here for registration.