Dear TEKPOL Partners,

This year we are celebrating the 25th Anniversary of TEKPOL's foundation. Therefore we believe it will be a valuable opportunity to reconnect with our partners all over the globe working in the field of science and technology policy-making and decided to host a series of online seminars in the spring semester of the 2023 academic year.

Our next guest will be Ugo Fratesi, from Politecnico di Milano, Italy. His presentation title is; On the mechanics of S3: firm competitiveness and territorial employment growth.

The seminar will be held on 26 May (Friday) 2023, at 11:00 GMT+2 Italy time (12:00 pm Turkey time), through ZOOM. The Zoom link will be shared with the registered participants before the session.

The moderation of the seminar will be conducted by Prof. Dr. Semih Akçomak from METU TEKPOL.

Registration is mandatory and the form can be reached through this link:

https://forms.gle/XNVN3CkmwVFkt9Gg6

It is possible to register until Thursday evening before the seminar (25 May 2023)

Kind Regards,

TEKPOL, Science and Technology Policy Research Center

About Ugo Fratesi:

Ugo Fratesi is Professor of Regional Economics and Policy (SSD applied economics, SECS-P/06) at Politecnico di Milano, Italy. In 2023, he has been appointed as the next Editor in Chief of Spatial Economic Analysis. Previously, for eight years, he was the Editor of main section papers and Book Review Editor of Regional Studies and, before, held the same role for five years for the Italian Journal of Regional Science. He is a fellow of the Regional Studies Association. He was councillor of the Italian Section of the Regional Science Association International (AISRe) and its Treasurer for the period of 2010-2013. He has been involved with various roles in a large number of research projects, especially at European level, financed by the ESPON, FP5, FP7, Horizon and PRIN programmes, or the European Commission directly. He is author of a textbook on "Regional Policy: Theory and Practice", published by Routledge in 2023.

He is also author of academic books and articles published in refereed journals in the field of regional economics and policy, primarily on the themes of regional growth and development, policy assessment, cohesion policy, territorial capital, the models for forecasting regional growth, the theory and measurement of regional disparities, the territorial aspects of human capital and innovation.

He has a long experience of university teaching at the undergraduate, master and PhD levels, as well as in training to policymakers and civil servants within the Italian National School of Administration (SNA).

About the Seminar:

Smart Specialisation Strategies, the core of EU regional competitiveness policies, involve interventions on firms with the idea that these will spread out to the wider local economic system (entry mechanism). This presentation is a summary of the paper that tests this idea, which looks at the link between firm competitiveness, industry specialization and territorial growth at a small functional spatial scale. With a novel counterfactual methodology, it supports the existence of this link since, in places and industries where firms are more competitive, more jobs are created. Moreover, specialisation does not have a positive effect, while positive effects exist for sectors involved in regional S3.