Editorial

A new Enterprise-University Dialogue framework has been initiated based on EUI-Net achievements and experience. It is aimed to prepare a major pilot project at European level able to establish a powerful framework and infrastructure for University Enterprise cooperation. Along with the partner Universities, it will bring a large participation of non-university partners, especially SMEs, relevant European NGOs, student associations and other social partners. The new pilot project, currently under debate within an inner circle as part of EUI-Net is going to start several action lines related to entrepreneurship, mediation and quality assurance of practical placements of students as well as the creation of a unified European database for jobs and university graduates. The latter will be achieved by integrating the Student Career Development Offices databases across Europe into a unique online database that is going to become a veritable barometer on the high qualification jobs offer and demand at European level. Preparation of this new vision as well as launching the tuning questionnaires based research along with the Conference in Tallinn have been given the highest priority in the last few months of EUI-Net activity. 

Doru Talaba, EUI-Net project coordinator.

European Conference on European Models of Synergy between Teaching and Research in Higher Education, 4-5 May 2006, Tallinn - Estonia

The topics were related to the following issues:Teaching & Training in Research, Actors of the Teaching & Research process: added value for industry; Integrating research results in teaching; University - Industry Teaching & Research Synergy; – best practice and case studies.

In May 6, 2006, at Tallinn as well, the 2^nd meeting of the EUI-Net General Assembly took place. The main discussed issues were:

    1. Administrative matters;

    2. Presentation of future EUI-Net activities;

    3. Continuing the activity in EUI-Net after 2007.

EUI-Net Workshop on University - Enterprise Dialog, 5 June 2006,  Poiana Brasov - Romania

In June 5, 2006, at Poiana Brasov, Romania, the Workshop on University – Enterprise Dialog took place, in the presence of Mr. Ettore Deodato - European Commission DG for Education and Culture. Some new participants coming from the private sector and the European Associations of SMEs attended the meeting: Anita Monea, Amadesign, Italy, Elena Pellaschiar, President of Jeunes Entrepreneurs de l’Union Européenne - JEUNE, Liliane Volozinskis, Director of Social Affairs and Employment Policy, UEAPME, Bruxelles. They are going to join the EUI-Net efforts in order to define the strategic action lines of the network in the next four years.

2 Workshops on SIG5 "Jobs and Employability" - key issue for the cooperation between University - Enterprise, took place in Athens in June 19-20, 2006, and respectively 16-18 July. The main issue was related top the development of a database for graduates and employers. Daedalus Informatics ltd presented and demonstrated a comprehensive and very versatile database structure that has been adopted as model for EUI-Net database (see presentation). Another interesting presentation has been given by Prof. Csaba Forgacs co-authored by Monika Andrasi, related to the development of branch of Career Development Centres (CDO) in Europe within EUI-Net network (see presentation).

The second Workshop was attended by Ms Ursula Axmann, Ms Michaela Erhart from CDO Vienna and Ms Adrienn Losonci  from CDO Budapest. Together with the representatives of EUI-Net a structure of a unified database was established. Currently  an experiment is ongoing in order to prove the viability of an European database assembled from information extracted form the CDOs individual databases.

The research team is able to announce that after a pre-testing period, the questionnaires are now ready to be filled in. We invite all partners to contribute to the research by contacting about 10 respondents from each of the following categories:

·         Academics from higher education involved in the engineering education.

·         Employers from all the fields: companies, government, other.

·         Graduates from higher education.

EUI-Net Dissemination Activities

Participation at the The European Summer University                                                             (http://www.univ-paris7.fr/UEE/UEE2006.htm), July 3-7, 2006, Paris, France [more].

Participation at the 8^th International Conference on Mechatronics and Precision Engineering, June 8 – 10, 2006, Cluj-Napoca, Romania [more].