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Linking University Research and Entrepreneurship: New Social Roles for Universities in Southeast Europe? will be the Topic of a Conference in Sofia, organised by the ASO Sofia and supported by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Culture in the framework of its SEE science cooperation initiative. The final Programme is out now [.doc].
Universities are confronted with changing framework conditions and new social demand. The self-understanding of universities is in discussion and the institutional fabric of university structures is under pressure to change and to adapt. As the educational university was changing to the Humboldtian model in the 19th and 20th century, the Humboldtian model of the university itself is currently challenged by a new entrepreneurial model understanding. Especially in Europe, the Lisbon targets to make Europe the most competitive knowledge-based economy of the world, the creation of a common European Research Area and an European Higher Education Area as envisaged in the Bologna declaration call universities to enhance their ability to develop new activities in addition to well established educational programmes. Especially the development and improvement of university-business linkages and of university-labour market linkages are in demand.

This conference aims to discuss different new role perceptions of universities with a special focus on Southeast Europe. In front of this background, a thorough understanding about new organisationally embedded functions of universities designed to address new social challenges in a flexible and pro-active way should be established. Special attention is directed towards university based business entrepreneurship centres and university based research centres fulfilling an innovation oriented interface to business needs. The state-of-art of these new university structures will be presented, success and failure factors analysed. In addition to the new challenges, the Southeast European universities are facing a number of inherited internal systemic structural deficiencies connected with economic shortfalls which effect the whole research and innovation system negatively. Especially research activities are under-financed, research programmes very often below any critical mass and corporate and international funding opportunities insufficiently known and addressed. Special attention will be directed towards the exchange of creative approaches to develop new university functions despite difficult framework conditions.

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Kontakt:
Martin Felix Gajdusek (MSc)
Head of the office - ASO Sofia
Austrian Science and Research Liaison Office Sofia
ul. Moskovska 5, BG-1000 Sofia
Tel. +359 2 987 20 69, Fax: +359 2 986 17 54, Email: aso-sofia@zsi.at