UNIVERSITY CHAIR ON INNOVATION AS A LEVERAGE TO PROMOTE A CLOSER COOPERATION BETWEEN ACADEMIA AND INDUSTRY AND SUPPORT LOCAL DEVELOPMENT IN THE MEDA REGION

The globalization and the interdependency principles are more and more underlining the increasing need to comply with economic, social and environmental issues. In this frame of action Innovation and Innovation Management become essential instruments and methodologies to be able to manage the changes that the social society and its productive sector is due to face in order to find the right balance between competitiveness, trade demands, social equity and sustainable development. Following an Innovation Systems approach to analyzing the effectiveness of introducing innovations, one can see that a specific set of competences are to be developed and taught within countries. In this contest, there is a clear role that needs to be played by the local universities and by an international network of higher education institutions.
The Innovation Policy Trends Report for the MED-Zone Countries for 2006 (IPTR, 2006) covers the eight countries of Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, the Palestinian Authority, Syria and Tunisia. This project is targeting specific problems and obstacles facing innovation and the university-industry relation in the MEDA region. The preliminary analyses that have been carried by the MEDA partners of this consortium (SEKEM and Cairo, Hassan II, Aleppo, S.Joseph and Sfax Universities) identified the problems to be targeted in this project and related to the gap between industry and universities and the general low attitude of both toward using innovation to create values.
The project proposal take it origin from an initiative started in 2006 and developed by the 3 European Universities (Delft University of Technology, Graz University of Technology, and the Politecnico di Milano) aiming at establishing “Global Network of University Chairs on Innovation”.
The EU higher education policy towards the MEDA countries is to strengthen the role of higher education institutions in society at large; to address the "knowledge triangle" of education, research and innovation at university level; and to encourage links between higher education institutions and the labour market, including the promotion of entrepreneurship and the creation or support of business start-ups. The overall objective of this project is bridging the gap between the innovation needs of industry and the supply of universities, in terms of human resources and technologies by establishing a “University Chair on Innovation”. This project has 5 specific objectives that
• Establishing university Chairs on innovation in the MEDA Region
• Developing Technology Transfer Policy and Training the Chair Operators
• Initiating a re-skilling program on Innovation.
• EU MEDA Twinning MSc Thesis Program
• Developing an EU-MEDA Virtual Environment and Strategy for University-Industry Cooperation in Innovation
Essential element of the project is also the Management and Quality assurance unit which will take care of both the Internal quality control and the External Quality Control; the unit will include experts from the UNIDO, SEKEM and IMC will be responsible for the implementation of this activity. TU Graz will be leading the TGQ.
The project, funded within the framework of the TEMPUS EU project, will be describe in details in term of problems analysis, pedagogical methodology, activities contents of the training programme, involvement of academics, students and stakeholders as well as quality assurance processes and indicators.