JUSTIFICATION

Iidentification of perceived needs and constraints in the target countries
Globalization and the explosive development of digital technologies in the last decades have accelerated the advent of the current knowledge-based society and economy. This process has put Universities and Research Centres, which are the ultimate knowledge factories, in the position of playing new and strategic roles in the development of society at large. But in order to turn this challenge into a real opportunity, Universities throughout the world, especially in Europe, have to undergo dramatic changes in the way they relate to the marketplace, to their stakeholders, and to the other regional actors. They need to provide ever better professional skills to their students in terms of curricula, and internship opportunities but this is not enough, novel modalities of job placement, of promoting entrepreneurial vocations and strategies have also to be provided. With respect to Businesses and Industry, Universities can act as producers of technological innovation, as well as providers of innovators. As far as Udine see e.g. the websites relative to the projects “CampusOne” (www.campusone.it/), “Startcup” (www.startcup.com/udine), “Friuli Innovazione” (www.uniud.it/cfi/).

A key preliminary step for enhancing quality of service in this sense is to streamline the flow of information and knowledge among a multitude of actors institutions have to relate to. What are badly needed are appropriate software tools, web-enabled services, and knowledge management systems, which increase dissemination and accessibility of information which go well beyond what general purpose World Wide Web portals and general purpose Internet search engines provide. Traditional tools can have negative effects, often providing off-target, irrelevant or inappropriate information, i.e. sheer noise which has to be filtered out.

To overcome such criticalities, many Universities have tried to apply current forefront research on intelligent information filtering and retrieval systems to increase connectivity and accessibility between students, researchers, on one side and businesses and Business Associations on the other side. Specific portals, supporting information filtering and knowledge synthesis features, have been developed for addressing the strategic activities of establishing professional internships for students in enterprises, or job placement, or enhancing the process of matching demands and offers of technological innovations for enterprises. This last point is particularly relevant for SMEs which are the ones which can invest only very little in R&D and hence are the enterprises most in need of enhancing the efficiency of their communication with public research institutions.

This project builds on the above strategies, and intends to tailor them to the issue of improving the dialogue between Europe and India. Past experiences, which some of the partners have had, indicate that already the language barrier, let alone the cultural difference, is particularly difficult to overcome especially if we consider Southern Europe, say Italy or Spain. The possibility of exploring the use of software tools successful for developing the appropriate information network between academia and industry, which has just as potentially impenetrable cultural barriers, is therefore particularly promising.

This approach has a number of added values.

• Carrying out the proposed activity of establishing special purpose workgroups, and promoting the exchange of experts and post-graduates, in the field of ICT, will eventually lead to the development of a permanent community of researchers and end-users on intelligent digital platforms. Many further actions might spin-off from workshop and conference activities.
  
• Pooling the Computer Science knowledge and competence of researchers in Computer Science both from Europe and India, will allow to increase the potential of the tools under customization. Informatics, in the broad meaning, which it has acquired in the English language, comprising digital information based methodologies, technologies and models, will therefore play a twofold role. It will be used as a medium for achieving a strategic improvement in the accessibility of data, information and knowledge, but at the same time it will also be the very first example of knowledge to disseminate and cross-fertilize.

The actions planned in the project have proved to be rather successful in the European setting for bridging the gap between academia and SMEs and promoting the culture of technological innovation. We stand a very good chance that the same might happen in the context of the EU-India relation.

This project is not a project in technological research, although it builds on the deliverables of research projects within the FP5. It is rather a project for focusing on the needs and constraints of the target countries, by promoting the exchange of information, of basic strategies, and pooling experiences. It can be directly synergic with other EU projects such as Asia-Link or FP6.

List of target groups with an estimate of the anticipated number of direct and indirect beneficiaries
The project is aimed primarily at:

• research workers, experts, post-graduates in ICT;
• experts in education and technology transfer;
• executives from central and state government agencies;
• businesses and professionals in ICT.

More specifically the target groups of our action are:

• Students, primarily of Udine, Genoa, Valencia, Hyderabad Universities and Research Centres, and most notably those involved in our joint Master and PhD programmes in Information Technology.
• Businesses (especially SMEs), primarily of Udine, Genoa, Valencia, Hyderabad areas, and more specifically those interested in partaking into student internships projects, and technology transfer initiatives.
• Researchers and ICT professionals willing to pool their knowledge and competences in developing or customizing innovative intelligent internet-based specially targeted tools such as search engines, knowledge portals, digital libraries. Primarily these would be those either working directly or indirectly with the Universities and Research Institutions involved in the project.

We expect to involve in these initiatives various dozens of students, businesses and researchers and over two hundred participants in the workshops, run during the project. This could be a rough estimate as to the number of direct beneficiaries. Obviously, since accessible knowledge databases, and portals will be among the outputs of the project, the number of indirect beneficiaries is likely to increase significantly.

Reasons for the selection of the target groups and activities
The target groups of the project are the basic actors in the knowledge society. At the top, there are Universities, Research Centres, and SMEs located in the Udine, Hyderabad, Valencia and Genoa regions. Then, there are EU-Indian Central/State Government Agencies and Business Associations. Cross-cultural development in the XXIst century has to be centred on these. The activities of the project have been strategically chosen so as to address their current needs of improving digital dissemination of knowledge. The workplan optimizes the potential benefits coming from novel knowledge management systems.

Relevance of the project to the target groups
Clearly, both the workshops, and the very fact that the tools will be available over the web, will have significant demonstrative value, for companies and individuals not directly involved in the actions, both in Europe and in India.

Furthermore, we expect to strengthen the effectiveness of our existing joint actions, and streamline the organisational processes within such actions. It is likely that other Universities and Research Institutions, as well as businesses might want to join in our initiative. But it is also quite likely that they might want to take our initiatives as a model to tailor to their needs and start their own initiatives. Natural end-users will be Universities, Chambers of Commerce and Business Associations. But the need for developing simple knowledge management tools and digital libraries is so widespread that the potential of our initiatives is very broad. We feel that the proposed initiatives have the potential to put into action a considerable cultural momentum, which will surely have far reaching impact in e-governance. The amount of data, information, and knowledge currently available using traditional tools is either scarse or way too overwhelming and mixed with much off-target and inappropriate information for anyone to be able to utilize it efficiently. We feel that intelligent special purpose digital portals are the tools target groups presently lack.

Relevance of the project to the objectives of the programme
The project matches the objectives of “EU-India Economic Cross Cultural Programme”, focusing on topics which are fundamental for strengthening and enhancing civil society linkages and developing cross cultural cooperation between India and the European Union.

Relevance of the project to the priorities of the programme
The project aims at integrating new communication technologies in education and disseminating entrepreneurial research/know-how from academia to business, with emphasis on SMEs and job creation. It is clearly particularly relevant as far as e-governance issues in Institutions are concerned. The emphasis put on topics pertaining to the dissemination of cultural heritage will speed up the cross-cultural exchange effect of the actions.