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The Making Knowledge Work project organised two workshop sessions at the Creativity World Forum on 16th and 17th November in Hasselt, Belgium. The objective of the two sessions was to outline the success stories of the project and showcase how regions and cities were supporting innovation and how these regions were then sharing best practice and learning from each other to improve the competitiveness of regions and Europe. Both workshops were well attended and this was an excellent opportunity to bring the Making knowledge project messages and outcomes to a wider audience interested in creativity and design.

Laurens Meijering from Brainport Development the project manager, for Making Knowledge Work, introduced both workshop sessions with a showing of the Making Knowledge Work video that outlined the context of the project – the innovation paradox. Europe has lots of research and innovation but we struggle to commercialise the innovations which are then often taken up by our competitors such as the United States.

Making Knowledge Work is a European transnational cooperation programme and in the first workshop, Nicolas Singer from the Joint Technical Secretariat in Lille, outlined the transnational cooperation programme with specific reference to the Interreg IVC programme – interregional cooperation. So far the IVC programme has approved 122 projects involving over 1300 partners across Europe. Nicolas Singer pointed out that there is stiff competition as the Secretariat has received over 1300 applications for projects which indicates that only the best get approved!

Following Nicolas Singer, Leo Bauman outlined recent Nokia thinking on innovation which highlighted some of the innovative activities that Nokia was involved in such as open innovation, innovation mills involving patent recycling and social innovation. What was interesting was that once a pilot project was seen to be a success in one region or city then other cities and regions were keen to take up the ideas which matched the ethos of the Making Knowledge Work project.

The next sessions were rapid bite-size presentations introducing the audience to Mobile Heights in Lund an open innovation hub for start ups that has already proved its success in the last two years and the Birmingham Innovation Engine drawing on practices used in Nord-Pas-de-Calais for evaluating company profiles and circulating innovative ideas using a plug-play-partner approach. Navarra presented their ‘creative space’ which featured ‘learning by doing’ and encouraging open innovation.

Kujawsko-Pomorskie also had a learning example and presented their project to build a series of astronomy centres in the region to encourage children to study science. Lancaster University outlined the activities that they were supporting in Cumbria a rural part of the North West region in England and opened up a discussion on the need to remove barriers amd build capacity to help create the flow of innovative ideas.

Finally Nord-Pas de Calais presented their Innoscope project which supported a more evidence-based policy making tool and reminded the audience that in times of severe economic crisis, spending had to be targeted, effective and efficient.

The workshop then opened up to the audience and following a brief summary of the key issues that had come out of the presentations by Richard Tuffs from ERRIN, the the audience engaged in a discussion based on ‘tweets’ pasted up on the Tweet'm Wall. The final speaker, Betrand Wert from DG Enterprise and Industry, who had been closely involved with the MKW project, then closed the workshop with a wider discussion on the importance of innovative procurement to harness the 17% of EU public spending to drive innovation.

In the second workshop, in a keynote address Professor Alessandro Deserti from Milan presented the Milan design cluster and pointed out how design was moving from an add on service to a product to the strategic level and is increasingly seen as an engine  of innovation and playing a mediation role in a post-industrial society.

Maxim Schram from RedesignMe then spoke about his company that was a web-based platform using crowd sourcing in co-creation activities to improve designs. Wycliffe Raduma from Aalto University then presented the Aalto University digital design hub and design factory with specific attention on the exciting work going on in digital design and advanced materials at the univerisity.

Barabara Stankiewicz from the Lodz Region then presented the Art Inkubator which was the renovation of an old factory building to promote the creative industries and stimulate entrepreneurship which reminded the audience that Making Knowledge Work was all about using innovation to drive competitiveness. Finally Peter Bertels from Flanders DC gave some excellent examples of how innovative thinking had helped launch and develop companies in Flanders.

Again the Creative Mix session enabled the audience to interact and pose questions to the speakers based on the Tweet'm Wall.

In conclusion, the two 90 minute workshops enabled the project to get over the flavour of the project, the success stories and illustrated the strong contacts that the project had built up and will hope to continue through the ERRIN network in 2012 at the end of the project.

Find out more about Making Knowledge Work at  and the Creativity World Forum 2011  and contact communication@errin.eu for more information on the project.