PRESENTATION

The First Globelics Conference 'Innovation Systems and Development Strategies for the Third Millennium', an international conference on innovation systems and economic development to take place in Rio de Janeiro November 2 – November 6, 2003. The conference marks the establishment of a global network of researchers working on innovation system-research – GLOBELICS (www.globelics.org). One major academic aim of the conference is to enrich and enhance the quality of innovation research by applying some of its fundamental concepts such as 'innovation systems', 'competence building' and 'interactive learning' to issues at the core of economic development. It is well known that applying a theoretical framework outside the arena where it was first developed may bring fundamental new theoretical insights.

A second academic aim is to stimulate interactive learning between and among scholars from respectively the North, West, South and East. There are already quite a number of individual scholars as well as research groups active in the field of innovation research in Africa, Latin America, Asia and Eastern Europe. The conference, as well as the formation of the GLOBELICS-network, gives scholars in the South, including young scholars and Ph.D.-students more direct access to the most recent research in Europe and the US and the other way around.

A third academic aim is to stimulate leading innovation scholars in the US and in Europe to move their focus and attention toward the less developed world. Behind the effort lies the assumption that further insights in how innovation and competence building takes place in less developed countries helps to stimulate a renewal of development strategies and thereby has a real impact in stimulating development.

These objectives are reflected in the conference program.

The conference is organised in collaboration between Professor Bengt-Åke Lundvall, Department of Business Studies, Aalborg University, Denmark, Professor Luc Soete, Merit, Maastricht, Professor Frieder Meyer Krahmer, Fraunhofer Institut für Systemtechnik und Innovationsforschung (ISI) and Professor Jose Cassiolato, Federal University of University of Rio, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.