Regional Cooperation between Universities, Research Institutions and Industry

Abstract

Due to the fact that Slovenia is a small country in every aspect, we should cooperate at all levels of society in order to succeed among the global competition – to turn our smallness into an advantage. Thanks to this smallness everybody knows almost everybody else, which gave us a basis for cooperation in the past. In more recently, various mechanisms have emerged in Slovenia for encouraging more formal ways of cooperation among entities of the society, such as centres of excellence, technology centres, clusters, technology networks and technology platforms. In Slovenia, the players in the area of Information Communication Technologies (ICT) have established a solid tradition of collaboration between companies and research and development (R and D) institutions, which is of great importance in the world where development is rapid and where it is of vital importance for R and D companies to produce new products and solutions as quickly as possible if they want to expand. Today, almost all the leading Slovenian companies in the area of ICT are members of the ICT Technology Network (ICT TN), where they can find a place for cooperation and for the successful development, production and sale of integrated and user-friendly solutions and products. In this paper we will present ICT TN and its organisation. Special attention will be given to presentation of the four projects that members of ICT TN work on. The Centre of Excellence for Information and Communication Technologies (CE ICT), the Next Generation Network (NGN) Interoperability testing laboratory SINTESIO and the Technology Platforms (TP) are especially interesting projects because it is not just the technological aspect but also the social aspect – in the form of networking and collaboration – which is important.