Stakeholders Forum

Removing the Barriers to Creativity and Innovation?

Brussels (BE), April 2009 - The Learnovation Roundtable with the support of the European Commission invites active participation for the Learnovation Open Forum, organised as a contribution to the European Year of Creativity and Innovation on 27 May in Brussels.




In order to reach a common European vision of creativity and innovation in education and society, the concerns, vision, and contributions of all stakeholder categories must be taken into account, going beyond the classical divisions of government-private sector-civil society and adopting a genuinely open approach where all the voices are heard with the same relevance.

To reach this aim, the Learnovation Roundtable is organising a conference specifically aimed at contributing to the European policy cooperation for the following decade. It will include all the people heard in the past expressing interesting and promising ideas on how to remove barriers to creativity and innovation in our education and training systems: grass-roots innovators, institutional representatives, and thought leaders on the theme of innovation.

The Conference will focus on:

  1. The concrete elements that can be brought on the agenda that correspond to the expectations and concerns of stakeholders in relation to barriers of innovation and use of ICT for learning.
  2. Approaches to aid in making stakeholders voices heard in the definition, implementation, and evaluation of creativity and innovation policies and initiatives.

The event will be structured in an innovative and open way along the different visions and contributions in all stakeholders' categories. During the Conference, E&T experts will interact with national and local policy makers in charge of education, EC representatives will listen to the concerns of school teachers directly from their voice, representatives of certification bodies will answer the questions of informal learning practitioners, and so on.

The conference will gather around 100 participants, including representatives of the European Commission, the European Parliament, the Member States, research networks dealing with education, the content industry, university networks, and civil society actors and networks.