The S3 Community of Practice (S3 CoP) together with DG REGIO are organising a series of webinars directed to S3 stakeholders from regions across the EU Member States, bringing together experts, policymakers, and key industry representatives to discuss common challenges, good practices, and lessons learned from EU regions in selected S3-related areas.

The third webinar in the series will focus on "Understanding the bottlenecks to innovation diffusion: insights from EU regions" and will be held by the S3 CoP Working Group on Innovation Diffusion on 23 May 2024 from 10:00-12:00 CEST.

This webinar is designed to engage S3 practitioners, policymakers, and key stakeholders in a dialogue about the challenges that EU regions are facing when trying to foster innovation diffusion. Innovation diffusion can be defined as the process through which different organisations gather ideas from outside and use them to introduce an innovation (e.g. a new process of production, a new product itself or a new way of providing a service) and comprises also the process of adoption of existing technologies (e.g. purchasing machinery developed elsewhere or signing a license agreement for an existing patent). It includes the analysis of how new ideas, practices and innovation spread through a society. In so doing, it is essential to involve SMEs, the backbone of the EU economy, which are extremely difficult to engage and yet are critical to understand innovation needs and dynamics across territories.

Learn more, find the full agenda and register here.

The S3 CoP WG on Innovation Diffusion aims to foster a learning process for relevant policy stakeholders on the fulfilment of the S3 enabling condition for innovation diffusion. 

Other webinars currently announced in the series include "Empowering interregional collaboration – from capacity to funding" on 16 May 2024 from 10:00-12:00 CEST and "Paving the way for industrial transition through systemic change and inclusive strategies" on 22 May from 14:30-16:30 CEST.