Keynotes

Mr Simone Baldassarri, Administrator, the Directorate General Enterprise and Industry, EU  
Dr Thomas Cooney, President, European Council for Small Business and Entrepreneurship ECSB and Academic Director, Institute for Minority Entrepreneurship at Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland
Dr Robert A. Chernow, Vice Provost for Entrepreneurship, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), USA
Dr Helena Forsman, Senior Researcher, Lappeenranta University of Technology, LUT Lahti School of Innovation, Finland
Mr John Latham, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Business Development, Coventry University, UK
Mr Jonathan Potter, Senior Economist, OECD Centre for Entrepreneurship, SMEs and Local Development, France

Thomas Cooney

Dr Thomas M. Cooney is Academic Director of the Institute for Minority Entrepreneurship (DIT), and a Research Fellow at the Dublin Institute of Technology. He is President of the European Council for Small Business (2009-2011), a member of two European Commission Expert Groups, Visiting Professor at Turku School of Economics (Finland), a Board Member of IRCSET (Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology) a Board Member of INTRE (Ireland’s Network of Teachers and Researchers in Entrepreneurship), and a Board Member of ICSB (International Council for Small Business). He has researched, presented, and published widely on the topic of entrepreneurship, including the books ‘New Venture Creation in Ireland’ (with Shane Hill), ‘European Cases in Entrepreneurship’ (with Rickie Moore) and ‘Irish Cases in Entrepreneurship’.

Further information is available from his website www.thomascooney.com. 

Robert A. Chernow

Rob Chernow is currently the Vice Provost for Entrepreneurship at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, NY, a position he assumed in Jan. 2006. The year before, Rob was awarded an “Atlantic Fellowship” by the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the United Kingdom to develop recommendations to help the UK become a more enterprising (entrepreneurial) nation, and he traveled extensively throughout the UK and Europe.

Before going to the UK, Rob was the Senior Vice President of Entrepreneurship at the Kauffman Foundation (the largest foundation in the world dedicated to fostering entrepreneurship), where he was responsible for directing all entrepreneurship programs. Rob has consulted with more than fifty colleges and universities (including directly with 18 college presidents) on entrepreneurship both here and abroad, as well as with the OECD and the United Nations.

Rob has over thirty years of entrepreneurial and business related experience, both in the domestic and international arenas. Prior to joining Kauffman, he was the founder and president of two health care IT companies, one domestic and one international (Corporate Health Strategies and World Specialists Online); President of two major health care companies (MetLife’s Managed Care Group and The New York Presbyterian Health Care System, the largest hospital system at the time in the nation). Later, he was a Partner for PricewaterhouseCoopers, where he directed their international health care operations, many in developing countries and Latin America. Rob was also a Peace Corps Volunteer in Brazil.

Rob did his undergraduate work at Colgate University; his Master’s at the University of California, Berkeley; and his doctorate work at Yale in Epidemiology and Public Health.

Helena Forsman

Dr Helena Forsman is working as a Senior Researcher at Lappeenranta University of Technology, LUT Lahti School of Innovation. Her studies on innovation management and business development in SMEs have been presented in various international conferences and she has been a productive author of academic publications. Helena’s latest articles on the challenges of innovation development in small enterprises have been published in International Journal of Innovation Management, Small Business and Enterprise Development and International Journal of Technology Management. At the moment, she is a Guest Editor with her colleague for the special issue on “Measuring the Impact of Service Innovations on Performance” for International Journal of Services Technology and Management. Before her academic career, Helena Forsman worked more than ten years’ in practical-oriented R&D projects aiming at fostering business development in the context of small business. In addition, she has been an Entrepreneur for eight years in consulting business.

Dr Forsman is deeply involved in international research communities, e.g. she is a Scientific Panel Member of Innovation Society for Professional Innovation Management and a Member of the Editorial Board of Journal of Small Business Management. Furthermore, Helena has been a Reviewer for several international journals and conferences dedicated to publishing articles in the fields of innovation management, small business development and entrepreneurship. 

Further information is available from the websites: www.hforsman.com and www.lut.fi/en/lahti.

John Latham 

John Latham has a number of high profile roles at the local, regional, national and European level which include:

Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Business Development at Coventry University overseeing all industrial academic link activities; Director of Coventry University Enterprises Limited; Director of Acua Ltd; Director of UK Unplugged Ltd; Director of Business Link West Midlands Ltd; and Director of the regional Enterprise Europe Network, supporting innovation across the two midland regions of England.

John is also national advisor to Cisco, with a focus on ICT in the UK public sector; member of the UK National Measurement Board, the office reporting to the UK Science Minister and advising the UK Government on aspects of Measurement research and the provision of public services to industry. Additionally, he has a number of board positions related to innovation including UKBI the UK Government established UK Business Incubation Network and EBN the European Commission established European Business Network, with responsibility for all EU BICs (Business Innovation Centres).

At a regional level, John has worked as a consultant to numerous organisations such as BT, NHS Trusts and the Heart of England Tourist Board. John has also been an industrial secondee to the Competitiveness Unit of the Government Office of the West Midlands as well as Advantage West Midlands, advising and developing regional innovation strategies and projects. 

In addition to his public sector roles, John has worked for a number of private sector organisations in the last twenty years including large corporates such as BT, Jaguar, GEC Telecommunications and the JHP Group.

Finally John is also Vice-Chair of Governors at Stratford-Upon-Avon College.

Jonathan Potter

Jonathan Potter joined the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in 1997 to help develop its work on local economic and employment development. He is currently a Senior Economist responsible for OECD activities to strengthen local entrepreneurship and SME policies and to improve the evaluation of local development programmes. He manages an international case study review series on ‘Skills for Entrepreneurship’, which examines the skills required for entrepreneurship, how they are imparted by universities and vocational training institutions and the public policy challenges. 

He also runs a series of OECD reviews of SMEs, Entrepreneurship and Local Development, which involves case studies reviews in selected OECD cities and regions of how public policy can promote new and small firm development, such as through promotion of university spin-off enterprises and technology transfer processes.

He has recently produced publications on ‘Clusters, Entrepreneurship and Innovation’; ‘An OECD Framework for the Evaluation of SME and Entrepreneurship Policies and Programmes’; ‘Entrepreneurship and Higher Education’; ‘Global Knowledge Flows and Economic Development’, and ‘Making Local Strategies Work: Building the Evidence Base’.

Mr. Potter, a British national, is a co-founder of a leading British economic policy consultancy, Public and Corporate Economic Consultants, and a former senior consultant responsible for public policy evaluation in the PA Consulting Group.  He holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge and is a visiting professor at Birkbeck, University of London.