The 2011 Globelics PhD Academy brought the International PhD School on Innovation and Economic Development back to Tampere for its seventh edition. Following the first Finnish edition in 2008, the return to the University of Tampere confirmed the city as an important European base for Globelics’ doctoral training activities and strengthened collaboration between the network and the Finnish research community working on science, technology and innovation.
Held in May 2011, the Academy maintained its commitment to researchers investigating the connections among innovation, learning, institutions and development. A University of Helsinki record identifies the event period as 16–26 May and confirms Tampere as its location, with the University of Tampere serving as sponsor. As in other editions, the program was designed to provide doctoral candidates with an environment in which their research could be discussed alongside broader theoretical and policy debates.
An especially interesting dimension of the 2011 Academy was attention to the internationalization of innovation systems. A student workshop entitled “Trans-nationalizing innovation systems” was organized during the seventh International PhD School through TaSTI at the University of Tampere. The topic reflected changes taking place in the global organization of knowledge and innovation. Although national institutions remained important, research increasingly needed to account for flows of knowledge, people, investment and technological capabilities that crossed national boundaries.
The Academy provided a setting in which these transformations could be examined from different geographical perspectives. Research presented at the event included work on innovative capacity, workforce education and economic development across countries and regions of the European Union. Combined with contributions concerning developing and emerging economies, such work supported the comparative orientation that had characterized Globelics from its origins.
The Tampere model also emphasized interaction. The Academy’s broader program has traditionally combined lectures on advances in innovation studies with group discussions, presentations of participants’ research and direct feedback from experienced scholars. This structure allowed doctoral candidates to examine their own projects while simultaneously learning how similar theoretical questions were approached in different countries.
The 2011 edition thus represented a further stage in the internationalization of the Globelics Academy itself. Returning to Tampere demonstrated that the program had evolved beyond its original Lisbon base into a doctoral school capable of operating through different research institutions. At the same time, its intellectual focus was also expanding toward increasingly transnational dimensions of innovation. Together, these developments reinforced the Academy’s central purpose: building research capacity while creating durable connections among scholars studying innovation and development around the world.