Presently Head of Unit for “Innovation and EIT” at the Directorate-General for Education, Youth, Sport and Culture. She joined the European Commission in 1998 as Scientific Officer at the Directorate-General for Research, within the Unit for Marie Curie Fellowships. From 2007 she served as Head of Unit in the Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, responsible for the units “Marie Curie Actions – Networks”, “External and Internal Communication” and “International Cooperation North America, Latin America and Caribbean”. She studied Biological Sciences at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid where she completed an MSc and obtained her PhD. After working as researcher at the Spanish Research Council (C.S.I.C) she was awarded a Marie Curie Fellowship between 1996-1998.

On the basis of signs of high-enrolment and positive reception by participants, the JRC will make the Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) on Monitoring Smart Specialisation available for free until February 2020.

In relation with the Asturias RIS3 and the "JRC Science meets Regions" initiative, the Asturias' innovation camp took place in late March at Covadonga. Local representatives from the government, academia, industry and the civil society, together with external experts, discussed the challenge of ensuring the sustainability of an industrial region that produces raw materials generating a great amount of industrial waste while, at the same time, counts on natural landscapes of great ecological value. Participants' work focused on opportunities opened for sustainable technologies as well as on securing the social acceptance and viability of the solutions found, coming out with a set of targeted potential solutions ("prototypes"), a long-term vision (becoming a Circular Economy region of reference by 2030) and an appealing motto reflecting precisely the circular economy emphasis: "Asturias, paraíso circular".

As part of its support to Member States and Regions in the implementation of their S3 in the area of energy, the S3PEnergy organised a workshop on "State Aid Map in the Energy Sector" on March 19-20 2019. It brought together more than 20 State aid practitioners from managing authorities and intermediate bodies, from 11 different EU countries (BE, HR, FI, FR, HU, LT, PT, RO, ES, UK and SI). The aim of the workshop was to co-construct a State aid map in Energy to facilitate the application of State aid rules when implementing support measures with ESI Funds to innovative energy infrastructures, renewables and energy efficiency projects.

As part of the pilot project: "Science meets Parliaments/Science meets Regions", several innovation camps will be organised in various places across Europe to tackle a number of key challenges such as the circular economy and the raw materials industry in Asturias (Spain) on 28-29th of March, air quality in Sofia (Bulgaria) on 29-31st of March, urban renewal in Nijmegen (NL) on 17-19th of March and in Ghent (BE) on 8-10th of May, or healthcare in rural areas in Saxony-Anhalt (Germany) on 4-5th of April 2019. They are based on a methodology developed by the S3 Platform to support multiple stakeholders' involvement in entrepreneurial discovery processes and policy co-creation.

CONCORDi 2019, the biennial European conference on corporate R&D and innovation, launches a call for papers on issues related to the economics and policy of corporate R&D and innovation.

In February, the Committee of the Regions organised in Seville the annual gathering of the Euro-Mediterranean Regional and Local Assembly (ARLEM). On this occasion, The Smart Specialisation Platform chaired a side event on local innovation ecosystems, where three case studies prepared by the JRC were presented: Start-up ecosystem and the Technology Park Ljubljana (Slovenia), Digital social innovation ecosystem in Barcelona (Spain) and Innovation districts in Boston (USA). In addition, the President of Westpomerania region (Poland) presented its regional ecosystem.

The S3 Platform, in partnership with DG CNECT, will launch in the coming days a survey to investigate the states of digitalisation and digital competitiveness across industries within regions and DIHs positioning, as well as how DIHs and Smart Specialisation Strategies relate to each other and how they (or could) interact in the future. The survey is addressed to DIH managers and regional policy actors from regions hosting DIHs who will receive individual invitation emails to get access to it.

The JRC, in collaboration with the Greek Ministry of National Economy and Development organised a workshop in Thessaloniki in February 2019 with two aims: 1)to contribute to the improvement of RIS3 governance. Under the guidance of the JRC, participants jointly mapped the governance functions within each region and their position within the multi-level governance of S3; 2) to raise the ambition of RIS3 in Greece in preparation for the next programming period. To this end, invited experts presented examples of integrated projects aiming to transform production and consumption systems. These included projects in the circular economy, electric mobility and advanced manufacturing. A common feature of these projects was the combination of research and innovation interventions with synergetic actions in other policy areas, including urban planning and large-scale infrastructures.

The annual high-level event "Science meets Parliaments" was held by the Joint Research Centre (JRC) in February 2019 at the European Parliament. The event marked the launch of a serie of 26 national, regional and local events under the "Science meets Parliaments / Science meets Regions" Pilot Project under the auspices of the EP. Six of those events will adopt the modality of Innovation Camps, a methodology established by the Smart Specialisation Platform (S3P) in collaboration with the Committee of the Regions. During the event, the S3P provided a training on the methodology to representatives of Sofia (BG), Saxony-Anhalt (DE), Asturias (ES), Catalonia (ES) and Nijmejen (NL) together with two senior experts.

Dr Tudor Constantinescu is Principal Adviser to the Director General for Energy in the European Commission. He is an engineer and an economist by education. Before joining the Commission, he set up as Executive Director the Buildings Performance Institute Europe. He was the president of the Romanian Agency for Energy Conservation and for the period 2008-2009, he held the presidency of the EnR network of European Energy Agencies. Between 1996-2007, he coordinated the energy efficiency and related environmental activities of the Energy Charter Secretariat in Brussels.

Published on the Regional Studies's website, this online article sheds light on the European Commission’s Thematic Smart Specialisation Platform on Agri-food. It highlights the background of the initiative, the criteria for successful submissions and outlines the potential benefits the scheme can bring to collaborating European regions.

The 10th Annual forum of the EU strategy for the Baltic Sea Region will take place on the 12 and 13 June 2019, in Gdansk (Poland). Submissions proposals for seminar under the theme of "Circular and sharing economy as an answer to demographic changes and environmental challenges in the Baltic Sea Region" are open until the 15th February 2019.

This workshop was held on the 5th of February 2019 in Podgorica (Montenegro). It aimed at promoting Smart Specialisation as an important tool also for transnational cooperation in the Western Balkans. It also provided a dialogue forum to jointly discuss: strategic innovation policies, the identification of priorities of common interest, as well as their implementation across the Western Balkans.

On the occasion of the 4th Annual Meeting of European Scientific Diasporas in North America, that was held at the Austrian Embassy in Washington DC, Jürgen Haberleithner, former visiting scientist within the Smart Specialisation Platform, presented the inter-institutional poster (Joint Research Centre, Euraxess North America and University of Colima) entitled "Smart Specialisation: reconnecting European Science and Innovation Diasporas".

Magda De Carli is the Head of the Sharing Excellence – Country intelligence Unit within the European Commission's DG Research and Innovation (DG RTD). Her Unit contributes i.a. to the development of synergies between the research framework programme and the structural funds. In this editorial, she shares her views on the relationship between Smart Specialisation and Research and Innovation (R&I) policy.

The report provides an overview of the specific context of Arctic regions and examples of how Smart Specialisation has been implemented there, addressing challenges such as remote location, lack of critical mass, lack of connectivity between actors, and dependence on few dominant industries. The paper highlights cases of transnational, inter-regional and cross-border collaboration that succeed in turning the Arctic context into a source of competitive advantage, in the context of a Smart Specialisation approach.

The Smart Stories reflect the way in which stakeholders across Europe have used the Smart specialisation concept to develop their own innovation-driven development policies at national and regional level. The region of Upper Austria gives an account of the way in which regional stakeholders were involved in the policy process to define the five key priority areas, and the calls that have been launched. It also presents two key success stories emerging as a result of one of the calls.

The Smart Stories reflect the way in which stakeholders across Europe have used the Smart specialisation approach to develop their own innovation-driven development policies at national and regional level. The Region of Pohjois-Savo (Northern Savonia), Finland, gives an account of the cluster of water expertise that has been developed at Kuopio Science Park, its areas of application as well as the various cooperation schemes it is fostering.

Last November, the "S3 Thematic Platforms Conference and Meetings" held in Bilbao (Spain) brought together more than 250 participants: partners from the three Thematic Platforms on Agri-Food, Energy and Industrial Modernisation, representatives of the European institutions working on the development of Smart Specialisation Strategies across Europe, as well as thematic experts. Co-hosted by the Basque Country, this event consisted of a joint S3 Thematic Platforms Conference in which all platforms participated as well as three separate platform-specific meetings. All presentations are available online.