The second project meeting of OSIRIS took place last December 13th-15th in Fundão, Portugal. The event was dedicated to the theme "New Education and training systems for emerging jobs".

The focus was on challenges related to employment, innovation, education, social inclusion and climate / energy, and aims to better delineate and implement public policies of social and open innovation, through collaboratively defined action plans developed in different regional ecosystems .

The event kicked off with the city mayor, Paulo Fernandes, presenting the strategy of the Innovation Plan for Fundão. The presentation was a very enlightening look at the path that Fundão has followed.

The participants in the event were treated to several workshops, focusing on co-creative dynamics for the formulation of participatory policy ideas and knowledge exchange. In this context, activities focused on promoting involvement of individuals, organizations and companies in this ecosystem, with a view to identifying and implementing desirable changes in the seven Regional Policy instruments supported by the ERDF / ESF.

The themes of our workshops were: 

Policy Instrument (PI) priorities of partners and main co-creation theme – Thoughts, doubts, needs and relationships with PI’s priorities

Co-designing policies pushing for: “Better jobs for better cities” and “New skills for new jobs”

There was also a workshop developed by Åbo Akademi University in which project partners and a group of stakeholders went through all channels available to communicate the Osiris project, and were challenged to increase participation in the communication efforts. 

During the visits to the “Academia de Código” bootcamps participants gained an understanding of how Fundão addresses the problem of the mismatch between the labor market on one hand and the human resources and capabilities on the other hand.

Participants also visited the living lab and its innovation ecosystem, where all the stakeholders involved themselves fully and committed to the municipality strategy.

As part of the participation in this network and in view of the strategy that has been pursued by this Municipality in increasing the dynamics of the regional innovation ecosystem, evident impacts in terms of local and regional dynamics could be observed. The strategies have succeeded in attracting investment and in creating jobs. In the certainty that the co-creation philosophy will be fundamental for the integration and transfer of knowledge between administration, scientific and technological systems, companies and citizens, the team of the municipality is happy to fully embrace a close engagement with the Osiris project.