PHEMAC 1st Innovation Week Report
“PHEMAC First innovation week Cairo” was organized from 19th October to 22nd October 2020, it was hosted virtually by The Academy of Scientific Research & Technology (ASRT) and attended by more than 75 participants consolidating the existing relationship between the different stake holders; it gathered representatives from governmental institutions, private sector and general public to share project aims, results and benefits of capitalizing previous granted efforts.
The event was an excellent start to spread cooperation concept between EU-MPC & R&I actors through a process of science diplomacy outreaching and connecting between government, citizens, researchers, private sector, innovators and entrepreneurs who would benefit from project outcomes.
Its main objective is to raise awareness of inherent value of R&I and let targeted stakeholders become aware of what already has been developed and implemented because of gathering actions derived from PHEMAC and establish synergies with different initiatives and programmes addressing NEXUS approach in the EU-MPC region, by bringing together Euro-Mediterranean innovators, researchers, policy makers, international companies, investors and industrialists to exchange around the latest innovations and findings in the Water, Energy, Food sectors following a NEXUS approach and explore partnerships and business opportunities
The Event was held over 4 days
19/10/2020: Task Force Workshop
This workshop was introduced by ASRT and ECITD and aimed to explore the integration of actual and future resources required for optimizing a regional platform of EU-MED research outputs which hosts a set of resources and package of services for the benefits of funding agencies as well as identified end users by ensuring the adequate selection of stakeholders.
An introduction of the platform was done by specifying the offered benefits, the role of task force members and the future responsibilities and synergies to be established. The workshop tackled data security/protection issues that the platform must respect
ASRT kicked off this first day presenting future activities such as:
- Future meeting with national NCPs to present the platform.
- Review of the engagement package for funding agencies.
- Periodic meetings of Task force
- Elaboration of the web-based questionnaire
- Determination of the innovation flow chart
- Releasing the template for the survey
20/10/2020: Focus Group Workshop
This session intended to be an early validation step to gather an external vision from the consortium. In addition to ensure the engagement of external individuals to the project from targeted key stakeholders as an indirect way of promotion of the project outputs and engagement on the future use of the iHub.
The debate focused on:
- The missing ingredient to have a full/good involvement of stakeholders at large and private sector in particular in PHEMAC platform
- Potential expected short & medium-term impact and ways to measure it.
During this session, the moderator tried to focus the discussion on the 4 aspects analyzed during the Task Force workshop: The visibility of the project; Up scaling and adapting the solutions identified by PHEMAC; Increasing the human relationship; Crossing activities.
21/10/2020: Participatory Impact Pathway Analysis workshop
The third day was another day of deep-dive debate about methodological approach to be applied by PHEMAC during future PIPA workshops. Besides to initially test the methodology through hands-on work and to refine the approach and gather improvements for future functional benchmarking and complement the econometric studies.
This session scheduled future test audiences of virtual PIPA workshops using virtual tools and defined the analysis of commercialization potential activity.