PROMETHEUS: A NEW WAY TO SUPPORT ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTES IN EUROPE

Τhis paper, first stresses the lack of engagement activities, knowledge exchange and international collaboration of the European HEIs based on Innovation and Entrepreneurship and the importance that these activities have in the evolution of HEIs as a whole. Moreover, the innovative acceleration platforms in the EIT ecosystem are examined and presented in a comparative way. The comparison of existing entrepreneurship acceleration platforms provides the groundwork for the presentation of the PROMETHEUS solutions and systems. The elements that the proposed solutions and systems are dispensed, will set the framework for the reform of the European HEIs based on Innovation and Entrepreneurship in areas with major societal impact, such as Circular Economy, Climate Change, Environmental Protection, and Sustainable Development

A Review Of Interoperability Standards And Initiatives In Electronic Government

Being important at organizational, process and semantic levels, interoperability became a key characteristic of the new electronic government systems and services, over the last decade. As a crucial prerequisite for automated process execution leading to “one-stop” e-Government services, interoperability has been systematically prescribed, since the dawn of the 21st century: Standardization frameworks, that included guidelines ranging from simple statements to well defined international Web-Service standards started to appear at National and Cross-Country levels, powered by governments, the European Union or the United Nations. In parallel, most international software, hardware and service vendors created their own strategies for achieving the goal of open, collaborative, loosely coupled systems and components. The paper presents the main milestones in this fascinating quest that shaped electronic government during the last 10 years, describing National Frameworks, key Pan-European projects, international standardization and main industrial and research achievements. Moreover, the paper describes the next steps needed to achieve interoperability at technical, semantic, organizational, legal or policy level – leading to the transformation of administrative processes and the provision of low-cost, high-quality services to citizens and businesses

Using Social Media for Government Passive Expert-Sourcing

Social Media have been initially used by government agencies for general public oriented -˜citizen-sourcing’. Though this enabled the collection of useful policy relevant information and knowledge from the general public, and provided valuable insights into their relevant perceptions, it would be quite useful if this could be combined with the collection of policy relevant information and knowledge from experts as well (-˜expert-sourcing’). In this paper, a passive expert-sourcing method based on social media, which has been developed in a European research project, is evaluated from a fundamental perspective: the wicked problems theory perspective. In particular, we investigate to what extent this method enables government agencies to collect high quality information concerning the main elements of important social problems to be addressed through public policies: particular issues posed, alternative interventions/ actions, and advantages/disadvantages of them; as well as to what extent there is consensus about these elements among different stakeholder groups. For this purpose data are collected through interviews with Members of the Greek Parliament. From their analysis interesting conclusions have been drawn about the strengths and weaknesses of this expert-sourcing method, as well as required impro-vements of it

Using Social Media Monitoring for Public Policy Making - An Evaluation

Social media monitoring has been initially adopted by private sector firms in order to collect opinions, complaints and questions concerning their products and services, to be used for making appropriate changes and improvements of them and also for designing communication strategies. Recently government agencies have started adopting SMM, as a form of ‘passive citizen-sourcing’, in order to collect useful information from citizens concerning their needs, problems, opinions and suggestions, to be used for public policy formulation. It is therefore important to evaluate these first initiatives, so that the potential of SMM with respect to public policy making can be exploited, and at the same time appropriate adaptations and improvements of relevant ICT platforms and practices can be made, in order to reach higher levels of maturity. This paper makes a two-fold contribution in this direction. Initially it develops a framework for evaluating the use of SMM for supporting policy making, initially from the ‘classical’ ease of use perspective, and then from a public policy perspective, based on the wicked social problems theory. This framework is then used for the evaluation of three pilot applications of a novel method of SMM by government agencies and other policy stakeholders, which has been developed as part of a European research project