The Malta Council for Science and Technology recently held a Futurreg workshop at the University of Malta.
The Futurreg project is an Interreg 3C Project focused on Futures for Regional Development and is designed to have significant long-term impact on regional development policies by ensuring that ongoing or new strategic policy development processes are informed by high-quality futures tools and participatory processes.
A Futures Toolkit, providing a handy guide to vision development, horizon scanning and other foresight approaches, has been developed by the partners and is now available from the project’s website.
In the next phase of the project, the partners will be identifying two local pilot applications of the toolkit.
The Malta Futurreg Workshop focused on discussions of two potential pilot applications. The first relates to the ongoing Malta Regional Innovation Strategy (MARIS) Project, lead by Malta Enterprise, and its collaboration with the National Research and Innovation Strategy, lead by the Malta Council for Science and Technology (MCST) and other innovation strategy projects.
The second pilot application explores possible foresight support for the university’s long-term strategic plan.
The workshop was introduced by MCST policy manager Casingena Harper, who gave a brief introduction of the Foresight and Innovation Policies.
The high-profile group of speakers included, University of Manchester director of PREST Professor Luke Georghiou, Pascale Van Doren from the Destree Institute in Wallonia, and from Malta, University of Malta rector Prof. Juanito Camilleri, National Statistics Office director-general Gordon Cordina and MARIS project manager Jesmond Silvio.
Mr Silvio spoke about MARIS’ objective of promoting the culture of innovative thinking while working on human resources. He also spoke about reducing the gap between academia and
industry to create effective synergies.
Prof. Camilleri provided an overview of the changes that are currently underway aimed at improving the profile and branding, together with the administration and management of the university.
He identified a number of governance challenges facing the university in the coming year and said that the university’s research strategy would be a key focus of effort in 2007.
Dr Cordina discussed innovation indicators for Malta giving details of results of the Community Innovation Survey (CIS4) on innovative activities among enterprises lead by the NSO.