September 5th, 2019 – Utrecht (Netherlands)
The TREnD First International Workshop is the second milestone (MS2) of the TREnD project. It took place during the Conference on the Geography of Innovation & Complexity (GIC), hosted by Utrecht University (UU, partner of the TREnD project) between the 2nd and 5th of September 2019, as scheduled during TREnD Kick-Off meeting in Reggio Calabria.
The aim of the meeting was defining the operative framework for the research activities to conduct in Boston during the 1st WP of the TREnD Project. The framework rests on the overall objective to reduce the gap between EU excellences and EU disparities by empowering the linkage between R&I and Cohesion Policies, namely Smart Specialisation Strategies, Horizon 2020 and Cohesion Policy.
Today, the challenge for the EU is how to sustain the prosperity of the core city/regions driving the EU economy and at the same reduce the gap between them and the less developed areas.
This challenge implies two considerations that match the research objective and the activities envisaged by the TREnD project. The first, relates to the Resilience/Transition Management/Evolutionary Economy perspective. Regions and cities’ ability to adapt and respond to external shocks and their ability to manage the transition are crucial for a more inclusive development trajectory. The second, relates with the need to promote and empower a different regional – and sub-regional – development based on the place-sensitive approach that merges the people-based and place-based approaches into a new vision aimed at empower Distributed Development Strategies where economic development strategies need to be adaptive and to maximise the diversity of people, firms and places involved.
Complexity workshop: https://complexity.world
Complexity workshop key lessons: https://medium.com/@tabea.sonnenschein/key-lessons-from-the-gic-2019-8ae3da45e0ef
