The initiative aims to facilitate territorial partnerships across the country based on university knowledge bases with an aim to ensure direct access to information about innovation policy directions, enable and strengthen cooperation between local innovators, and create new professional foundations.

The future performance and competitiveness of the new Hungarian innovation ecosystem largely depend on increased local cooperation between stakeholders, such as policy-makers, higher education and research institutions, businesses and professional organisations; which can boost the innovation potential of each region in line with the priorities of the Smart Specialisation Strategy. To this end, building on the existing university centres and focusing on the real strengths of key regional innovators, the NRDI Office intends to create new hubs which adopt a new approach to facilitate information flow, knowledge transfer, collaboration and networking.

At the founding event of the TIP in Gödöllő, Dr. István Szabó, Vice President for Science and International Affairs of the NRDI Office highlighted: “It can significantly enhance Hungary’s economic performance if we manage to increase the utilisation of knowledge bases in the country, thus improving the innovation potential of SMEs. The Hungarian university network is clearly suited to become a central part of the innovation ecosystem, and it is particularly important to make university knowledge available to local small and medium-sized enterprises.”

As a regional knowledge centre, and a member of the AI and 5G coalitions, Szent István University aims at promoting the practical utilisation of research results, making technology transfer more effective, and building and making better use of partnerships to facilitate innovation processes in the region. As a hallmark of this effort, the university and its corporate partners have recently established the Centre for Higher Education and Industrial Cooperation in Agricultural Information, which will soon appear as a service provider in the fields of agricultural machinery and IT innovation.

Dr. László Palkovics, rector of the university, said in his opening speech: Szent István University is the largest domestic institution with an agricultural profile. Therefore, we not only interpret the local innovation ecosystem at the regional level but also at sectoral level and, based on decades of experience, at the level of the Carpathian Basin. In our view, research and development results should not only take the form of publications with a high scientific citation index, but should also give rise to a for-profit, privately owned company, in which developers and students work together to manufacture, distribute and commercialise products and services. This way we can feed the successful economic results of research and development back to a modern market-oriented academic education.”

The Territorial Innovation Platforms initiative debuted in November 2019 and aims to address as many major regional innovators as possible, including in particular universities, research institutes, large companies, SMEs, startups, clusters, incubators, accelerators, business angels and national chamber networks. So far, the TIP charter document has been signed by 11 universities in Budapest and six more in rural Hungary. In addition, five national professional organisations (Bay Zoltán Research Institute, National Union of Students in Hungary, The ICT Association of Hungary, Hungarian Association for Innovation, and Hungarian Intellectual Property Office) and many local stakeholders of the innovation ecosystem have joined the initiative. The opportunity is open to everyone: the charter document and the declaration of accession are available on the NRDI Office’s website.

For more information and registration to TIP events, visit www.nkfih.gov.hu/tip.

Ágnes Divinyi, International Affairs, National Research, Development and Innovation Office