Press invitation:”Innovation in Mind” conference attracts world-famous innovators to Lund

The experts come from many different sectors of society – research, industrial, cultural and the political arena. They will be offering exciting anecdotes, theories, predictions and behaviours, coinciding thought processes and the birth of new ideas. The organizers hope that besides what will be taking place on stage and behind the rostrums, there will be plenty of spontaneous meetings, conversations and exchange of ideas as a result of bringing together so many people with common interests and the topic of innovation on their minds.

Here is a presentation of just some of the speakers:

Nolan Bushnell – Named by Newsweek as one of the “50 Men who Changed America.” He has started more than 50 companies and is often referred to as the “father of the electronic gaming industry.”
Clay Shirky – social media professor who shows the enormous potential and driving force of the internet in terms of the influencing of public opinion as well as economics. He is author of the book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organization.
Amar Bhidé – Instead of taking over the family business in Bombay, he became professor of entrepreneurship at Columbia Business School. Among other things, he claims that a nation’s capacity to exploit new knowledge is critical. However, just where such new knowledge originates is irrelevant.
He will be holding a lecture titled, “Financing the Venturesome Economy. How Modern Banking and Innovation are in Conflict.”

Other participants are: Sahar Hashemi (lawyer, author and founder of the UK coffee bar chain, The Coffee Republic); Eric von Hippel (head of the Innovation and Entrepreneur Group at MIT and author to the book, Democratizing Innovation); Henry Chesbrough (Berkeley professor behind the concept “open innovation”); Curtis Carlson (head of the Stanford Research Institute) and Bengt-Åke Lundvall (ambassador for European Year of Innovation and Creativity) and many more. The moderator will be Kristofer Lundström, culture journalist at SVT. Read more at the following link: www.innovationinmind.se

“Innovation in Mind” will take place in a huge tent that will be set up at universitetsplatsen, right in the centre of Lund.
“Lund is the city of ideas and the conference is just one way of making this more visible to society,” says Vice-Chancellor of Lund University, Per Eriksson, who was previously Director General of VINNOVA (the Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems). Since taking up the position of vice-chancellor at the turn of the year, he has worked to strengthen the university’s innovation profile by doing such things as appointing a president and assistant vice chancellor that exclusively focus on these issues.

Besides Lund University, the main organizer is Region Skåne, which sees the conference as an important step towards a renewed and more deliberate innovation policy. The main partners are VINNOVA and Innovationsbron AB. The host city is Lund. As a kick-off prior to the conference, Q-day 2009 will be held on September 15. The organizer of this event is the non-profit association, Q, which is organizing the event for the third year in a row. Read more about it at the following link: www.qday2009.se