Innovation promotion activities in other regions
Due to the project I am working on now, I was looking for innovation promotion initiatives in several regions, that might be considered of reference for some islands like ours, the Balearic Islands.
The reference regions chosen were Madrid and Catalunya (as we work in the Spanish framework), Ireland (as it happens to be the country of reference in Europe in what has to do with tech development) and Hawaii islands (with a population, islands distribution and business profile quite similar to Balearic Islands).
The most remarkable characteristics detected in our little "benchmarking" analysis were:
- The commercial orientation of all public policies in the anglosaxon regions analysed. All web information is focused on selling their technological resources
- The fact that madri+d is a great source of information based on the visibility acquired by the agent that sends its information to the Portal. But the fact that they put their information in the portal doesn't mean that they work together to generate the information, they just put it there.
- Catalunya has several tech transfer networks, partly financed by regional government. They develop projects through the networks, but regional government has at this moment too much visibility in the networks management
- Hawaii islands have decided long ago to specialize in a few sectors of activities, and they try to focus their RDI infrastructure construction in these sectors. The results are quite good in the sense that your tech industry is limited, but what you do, you might do it very well.
Having all these in mind, I think it would be good for the Balearic islands to specialise in what we do best: tourism, and to create the best infrastructures for this.
The next question is, How do we research, develop and innovate through technology in tourism sector? I think that the answer is: through technology providers. We have to specialize in ICT in tourism (of course, key for all subsectors), but also in food for big communities, furniture for hotels and turistic areas, boat building for leisure time, etc. Furniture are too expensive to export, but design of accurate touristic furniture is exportable for free!!
The reference regions chosen were Madrid and Catalunya (as we work in the Spanish framework), Ireland (as it happens to be the country of reference in Europe in what has to do with tech development) and Hawaii islands (with a population, islands distribution and business profile quite similar to Balearic Islands).
The most remarkable characteristics detected in our little "benchmarking" analysis were:
- The commercial orientation of all public policies in the anglosaxon regions analysed. All web information is focused on selling their technological resources
- The fact that madri+d is a great source of information based on the visibility acquired by the agent that sends its information to the Portal. But the fact that they put their information in the portal doesn't mean that they work together to generate the information, they just put it there.
- Catalunya has several tech transfer networks, partly financed by regional government. They develop projects through the networks, but regional government has at this moment too much visibility in the networks management
- Hawaii islands have decided long ago to specialize in a few sectors of activities, and they try to focus their RDI infrastructure construction in these sectors. The results are quite good in the sense that your tech industry is limited, but what you do, you might do it very well.
Having all these in mind, I think it would be good for the Balearic islands to specialise in what we do best: tourism, and to create the best infrastructures for this.
The next question is, How do we research, develop and innovate through technology in tourism sector? I think that the answer is: through technology providers. We have to specialize in ICT in tourism (of course, key for all subsectors), but also in food for big communities, furniture for hotels and turistic areas, boat building for leisure time, etc. Furniture are too expensive to export, but design of accurate touristic furniture is exportable for free!!
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