General Assembly 2018 – short summary report
The 16th General Assembly of the European network Innovawood was held from 27 to 28 March 2018 in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The event was hosted by the Biotechnical Faculty of the University of Ljubljana, and was well attended by 36 representatives from 28 member organisations, representing 19 European countries.
InnovaWood as a network aims to serve the wider community in wood science and technology, said Mark Irle, Professor at the Ecole Superieure du Bois in Nantes, and President of InnovaWood. Looking back at the promising start of InnovaWood’s new initiatives in 2017, he is positive that the network can grow further and increase the benefits for its members. The main aim is to build joint initiatives that are of high interest to everybody, and to increase the active participation of the members in the network. The second aim is to increase the number of members in the coming years, enlarging the voice of InnovaWood as a main stakeholder in the European research and education programmes.
In the first part, the progress of InnovaWood’s on-going joint initiatives was presented. These include the InnovaWood Module Bank (presented by Mark Irle, ESB), the European Hardwoods Innovation Alliance (Andreas Kleinschmit v. L., FCBA) and the Capability Register (Giovanni Tosi, COSMOB). As new actions, a PhD students network and an EU funding navigator were proposed. Furthermore the new European Erasmus+ project EQ-WOOD was introduced (Cecilia Amo, AIDIMME).
Four organisations, who have also joined the network as new members, gave an introduction of their profile and their activities (see presentations below): BOKU University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna in Austria (presented by Rupert Wimmer), the ENAIP Foundation Lombardia from Italy (by Sara Tettamanti), the LBWUH State Forest Administration of the Federal State of North-Rhine Westphalia (by Melanie Blumentritt), and the DIT Dublin INstitute of Technology (by Joseph Little).
The last part comprised a training about European funding opportunities. Various European funding programmes were presented in the panel. Two open Horizon 2020 calls were introduced and analysed in detail. The participants shared their experiences and discussed the relevance of different programmes for wood research.
The social programme included a guided tour through the historical centre of Ljubljana and a joint dinner in the evening. On the second day, one group visited the Biotechnical Faculty, while another group went on an excursion to the InnoRenew Centre of Excellence in Koper on the Slovenian coast.
The General Assembly 2019 will be hosted by the Thünen Institute in Hamburg, Germany.
