The webinar is organised by the S3 Community of Practice (S3CoP) as part of webinars that the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Regional and Urban Policy, with the support of the S3 Community of Practice Secretariat, is organising for S3 stakeholders from across regions in EU Member States.  

S3 practitioners, experts, policymakers, and other key stakeholders will come together to engage in this webinar to discuss the main challenges that EU regions are facing when trying to foster innovation diffusion.

Innovation diffusion can be defined as the process through which different organisations gather ideas from outside and use them to introduce an innovation ( a new process of production, a new product itself or a new way of providing a service) and comprises also the process of adoption of existing technologies ( purchasing machinery developed elsewhere or signing a license agreement for an existing patent). It includes the analysis of how new ideas, practices and innovation spread through a society. In so doing, it is essential to involve SMEs, the backbone of the EU economy, who are extremely difficult to engage and yet are critical to understand innovations needs and dynamics across territories.

The working group (WG) on innovation diffusion developed within the Smart Specialisation Strategies (S3) Community of Practice (S3CoP) aim to foster a learning process for relevant policy stakeholders on the fulfilment of the S3 enabling condition for innovation diffusion. Learn more about the activity of the S3CoP WG on innovation diffusion here:

The webinar is designed to allow participants to keep up to date in the most recent activity of the WG on innovation diffusion, get insights from EU regions and participate in the discussions.