Organisation and management of scientific and entrepreneurial events
Today, innovation, research and development, constitute as one of the essential engines for the growth of companies and of the activities in the region. In this field, the Fondation Sophia Antipolis organises demonstrations of a scientific nature, symposiums, and breakfasts with the aim of emerging a new entrepreneurial culture. The Foundation also has a role of identifying new tendencies or new themes by creating company clubs. This step also lies within a European scope.
The competitiveness clusters represent a single chance for the technological companies to join industrial topics supported by the State, local and regional communities, academic research centres and large companies. Very involved in the politics of clusters, the Fondation Sophia Antipolis plays a major role in animating the park by holding regular seminars, conferences, breakfasts and workshops around specific themes. To support this action it has also created a website dedicated to clusters:
http://www.sophia-antipolis.org/poles2competitivite
The world is becoming more and more complex. Topics related to bioethics, climate change, management of industrial, political and natural risks need to be highlighted by global expertise. Today this needs to be reinforced. The Côte d’Azur and Sophia Antipolis can become a place where people’s worries are taken into account and analyzed. From this point of view, the Fondation Sophia Antipolis has been organizing for the last few years big international symposiums on issues perceived as significant in the overall reflection.
Initiated by Pierre Laffitte, these breakfasts gather between 50 and 100 people, whom are mostly business executives, researchers and scientists. Since 1994 multimedia topics and information highways have been the main subjects of these meetings of which the aim is to put in contact technicians and creators in order to develop the contents.
Since 2009, it was under the name Sophia Cafés that these breakfasts are held. They aim to bring together actors from the company and specialists on current and prospective topics. The subjects most discussed are mainly focused on innovation and issues related to its financing.
Every month at least one Sophia Café is organised. These breakfasts last in average one hour and thirty minutes during which presentations and testimonies are done followed by exchanges with the public - with a minimum of time devoted to inform and to connect with entrepreneurs, researchers, politicians, institutions and students.
The Foundation Sophia Antipolis creates and hosts a number of clubs in order to respond to the needs of different categories of professionals and users of the new technology of the park. These encounters encourage networks and transfers of technology as well as business opportunities between the different workers of the technopole.
Among its diverse activities, the department of organisation and management of scientific and entrepreneurial events pursues a continuous action of supporting the businesses of the park, notably by putting in place partnerships. Following its objective of supporting the creation and the development of innovative businesses, the Foundation Sophia Antipolis plays an informative, an intermediation and a communicative role.
One of the Foundation Sophia Antipolis’s objectives is to promote the creation a new entrepreneurial culture and to notably incite entrepreneurialship. For this reason the Foundation has created a link between the academic world and the business world via different actions in order to create direct communication between these two communities and to promote professional integration of students.
