Australia  

Over the past 20 years, European policy-makers have become increasingly conscious of the place-based dimension of regional and urban development, and have explored different policy approaches to distribute and share the learnings across a wide variety of regions in Europe. The impact of the Global Financial Crisis added some urgency to this question, as the European Union's Structural Funds constitutes the largest concerted effort aimed at economic development and achieving territorial cohesion.

Bringing together European innovation, urban and regional policy led to the development of a new emphasis on ‘smart specialisation strategies’, as a key element of Cohesion Policy design and implementation, commanding a budget of some 80 billion euros over 2014-2020. Approximately 160 regions have adopted smart specialisation strategies, with a view to strengthen their regional innovation systems, build competitive advantage and to test and trial policy experimentation aimed at future-proofing the region’s future prosperity, environmental sustainability and social wellbeing.

This Symposium offers the opportunity to hear from two leading European experts on smart specialisation, and the effectiveness of its design and implementation as a policy intervention. It offers an opportunity to understand the background to this initiative, and to explore its implications for innovation, urban and regional policy in Australia.

Panel

Chair: Karen Cain, Chief Executive Officer, Latrobe Valley Authority

Andrés Rodriguez Pose, Professor of Economic Geography at the London School of Economics

Manuel Palazuelos Martínez, Smart Specialisation Platform, DG Joint Research Centre, European Commission

Lars Coenen, City of Melbourne Chair of Resilient Cities, The University of Melbourne

WHEN: Wednesday 3rd October, 3pm – 5pm, with reception to follow

WHERE: Grattan Room, Melbourne Business School, 200 Leicester Street, Carlton 3053

FREE EVENT

RSVP Essential: https://smart-specialisation.eventbrite.com.au

Refreshments will be provided.  

Panellist Bios

Professor Andrés Rodriguez Pose

Andrés Rodríguez-Pose is a Professor of Economic Geography at the London School of Economics, where he was previously Head of the Department of Geography and Environment. He is the immediate Past President of the Regional Science Association International (2015-2017). He is a regular advisor to numerous international organizations, including the European Commission, the European Investment Bank, the World Bank, the Cities Alliance, the OECD, the International Labour Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the Development Bank of Latin America.

He is an editor of Economic Geography and sits on the editorial board of 33 other scholarly journals, including many of the leading international journals in economic geography, human geography, regional science, and management. He is a former holder of a European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant and the only social scientist to have been awarded the Royal Society-Wolfson Research Merit Award.

Dr. Manuel Palazuelos Martínez

Manuel works for the European Commission, where he is currently one of the people leading the work of the Smart Specialisation Platform of the DG Joint Research Centre. He has developed a good part of his career at DG ECFIN, the Directorate General of Economic and Monetary Affairs of the European Commission in Brussels. Prior to joining the Commission, Manuel Palazuelos taught at university, at the Department of Economics of the London School of Economics (LSE), where he was awarded five annual prizes for excellence in teaching, and where he did his postgraduate studies. He has also other postgraduate and graduate degrees both in Spain and the UK, and has presented his academic research in numerous universities such as Oxford, Columbia, London School of Economics, Cambridge or Georgetown.

Karen Cain

A Latrobe Valley resident for 23 years, Karen has significant experience working across government, leading strategic innovation, and developing and implementing policy in Gippsland.

Karen’s career in education as a teacher, principal and senior manager in two states, Victoria and Tasmania, has led to experience in preparatory to year 12 settings.

Karen has also worked with families and the community as a principal in government schools in the Latrobe Valley for 11 years, including Woolum Bellum Koorie School in Morwell, Traralgon College Junior Campus, and Lowanna Secondary College in Newborough. She has held several key roles in state and regional curriculum and policy implementation, notably in the areas of Special Education, Literacy, Indigenous Education and Post Compulsory Education. Her experience in developing and delivering on issues that reflect what matters to community and government has left her well prepared for the role of Chief Executive Officer at the Latrobe Valley Authority, which she has held since April 2017.

Karen was chair of the Baw Baw Latrobe Local Learning and Employment Network from 2000 to 2004. Karen is a fellow of Leadership Victoria’s Williamson Community Leadership Program and was also a member of the Gippsland Regional Managers Forum for six years. For the past 21 years, she has owned and operated a commercial beef farm with her husband at Boolarra South.

Professor Lars Coenen

Lars Coenen joined MSSI in January 2017 as the inaugural ‘City of Melbourne Chair of Resilient Cities’, an initiative between the City of Melbourne and University of Melbourne aimed at improving the city’s resilience to sustainability challenges. Working closely with the city’s Chief Resilience Officer, Lars seeks to strengthen Melbourne’s role as a leader in knowledge based urban resilience and to explore new models for collaborative research.

Lars is an interdisciplinary scholar cross-cutting the fields of innovation studies, economic geography and science and technology studies. His research interests converge around the geography of innovation: Why is it that some regions and cities in the world stand out in their ability to foster and diffuse novelty? What explains this spatial concentration of innovation in an era of globalization? How can regions and cities improve their capacity to innovate? In particular he is interested in addressing this broad set of questions on innovations related to pressing societal challenges such as climate change. His work has been published in leading international journals such as Research Policy, Environment and Planning A and Economic Geography. He is well-known for pioneering research on the geography of sustainability transitions. His paper ‘Environmental Innovation and Sustainability Transitions in Regional Studies’ has been awarded the 2013 best paper award in Regional Studies.