Prof. Dr. Philippe Gugler

Prof. Philippe Gugler received his PhD from the University of Fribourg in 1990. He did partially his PhD at Rutgers University (United States) with Prof. John H. Dunning.

He is President of the Department of Economics and is the Director of the Center for Competitiveness at the University of Fribourg. Prof. Gugler is affiliate member of the Institute for strategy and competitiveness led by Prof. Michael Porter at the Harvard Business School. He is member of the Board of the European International Business Academy as well as member of the board of several academic and economic associations in Switzerland and abroad. Prof. Gugler is invited Professor at the National Institute of Development Agency (NIDA) in Bangkok (Thailand).

He has published mainly in the fields of trade and competition, trade and investment, competition policy, multinational enterprises and competitiveness. His three most recent books are “Foreign Direct Investment, Location and Competitiveness – Progress in International Business Research” (Gugler and Dunning, 2008),“Expansion of Trade and Foreign Direct Investment in Asia – Strategic and Policy Challenges” (Chaisse and Gugler, 2009), and “Competitiveness of Asean Countries: corporate and regulatory drivers” (Gugler and Chaisse 2010).

Prof. Dr. Christian Ketels

Dr. Christian Ketels is a member of the Harvard Business School faculty at the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness. He holds a PhD (Econ) from the London School of Economics and is an Honorary Professor at the European Business School (EBS). Dr. Ketels is currently also a Senior Fellow at the Stockholm School of Economics and Director of TCI, the global network of cluster practitioners. He has led cluster and competitiveness projects in many countries and advised the World Bank, OECD, EU, NIB, UNIDO as well as a number of national governments. Dr. Ketels serves in advisory boards to research institutions and government agencies in Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia, and is a member of the European Commission’s European Cluster Policy Group.

Prof. Dr. Peter A. Abplanalp

Since 1998 and until December 2005, Prof. Dr. Peter Abplanalp was the President of the University of Applied Sciences Solothurn Northwestern Switzerland. He had an active role in merging his own school with several other institutions in the Northwestern part of Switzerland to form the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland. After the merger he stepped back from his management functions and since January 2006 he is again working as a professor at the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland.

Professor Abplanalp’s subjects are strategic management and cluster development. He has been teaching in graduate and executive education programs for years. Since 2003 Professor Abplanalp is teaching the course “Microeconomics of Competitiveness” (Cluster Development) based on materials developed by Prof. Michael E. Porter’s Institute of Strategy and Competitiveness at the Harvard Business School. This also raised his interest in cluster development and cluster management and led to several publications in this developing field.

Professor Abplanalp obtained his Ph.D. with distinction at the University of Basel in the early 1970’s. Prior to and intermittent with his academic career, he held managerial positions with leading Swiss companies such as Elektrowatt Holding, the Bâloise insurance group and the Swiss Federal Railroad system.

With the emergence of China on the international scene, fostering exchanges with Chinese universities and businesses has become the recent focus of Professor Abplanalp. He has initiated numerous seminars for prominent Chinese managers, administrators and professors. His current favorite China activity is creating a new Sino-Swiss network on the level of the Swiss Universities of Applied Sciences and their counterparts in China. 

Dr. Elisabeth Waelbroeck-Rocha

Is Vice-President of BIPE, France and a managing director general and manager of the cross-sector department. Elisabeth specialises in forward-looking industry analysis and forecasting, and economic modelling. Prior to joining BIPE as CEO in 2000, Elisabeth was Chief European Economist and Director of European Research at Standard & Poor's DRI. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics (1984), Masters Degree in Econometrics (1979) and an M.A. in Economics (1978) from the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium.

Prof. Dr. Matthias Kiese

Studied Geography and Economics at the University of Hannover and at the London School of Economics and Political Science. At Hannover, he obtained his PhD in 2002 with a thesis on the innovation and co-operation behaviour of manufacturing firms in Singapore. Until 2008, his postdoctoral research focused on regional cluster policies in Germany.

Following an interim professorship in Economic Geography at the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich, Matthias Kiese joined the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland`s Competence Centre on Strategy and Competition in September 2009 where he taught the Microeconomics of Competitiveness course developed by Prof. Michael E. Porter at Harvard Business School. In March 2011 he assumes a professorship for Human Geography with a specialisation on Urban and Regional Economics at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum.

Dr. Alessandro Minello

Having graduated in Political Science at the University of Padua with a thesis in Regional Economics, he has undertaken research at the Nexus Research Centre in Dublin, and at a number of private research centres in Italy. He is member of The Competitiveness Institute of Barcelona, the Regional Studies Associations of London and other organizations that aim at regional development.
Currently lecturer in International Economic Politics and European Integration, International Economics and the Economics of Information at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. He is also lecturer in Economics of Districs at the Master’s degree in Local Development at the University of Eastern Piedmont in Alessandria and Political Economy at the European University for Tourism in Tirana.
He conducts research for the Interdepartmental Centre for the Culture and Economics of Globalisation (CEG) at the Treviso site of the University of Venice and, recently, has founded EconLab_Research Network, an economics laboratory for multidisciplinary researchers and scholars analysing the social and economic dynamics in order to foster innovation and human capital, improve the global urban and regional competitiveness and promote the sustainability of territorial development. He has taught economics for numerous further education courses and has often acted as the University’s special advisor for these courses.
He acts as a freelance consultant for the Veneto Region (regional and commercial planning), for the Unioncamere of the Veneto (regarding the EU Challenge programme), for the Province of Treviso (for the Provincial planning), as well as other local bodies and trade associations.
He is coordinator and principal scientific advisor for a research programme regarding the industrial districts of the Veneto (on behalf of the Veneto Region and Veneto Lavoro), and covers the same roles for some projects of economic cooperation between the Veneto region and several regions in Chile.

Research fields
Alessandro Minello deals principally with economic development, competition, innovation, internationalisation of systems, cluster economics, human capital, local planning, mobility, urban economics, public services, the assessment of EU structural intervention (regarding which he has undertaken methodological studies), cohesion policies, local-regional imbalances (especially in the context of European enlargement), social policies regarding marginalised people, and social inequality.

Mr. Werner Pamminger

Werner Pamminger is an experienced executive and senior consultant for a few years. After a couple of years in industry as an engineer, Werner is since 2006 the general manager of Clusterland Upper Austria Ltd. the Upper Austrian regional development agency for cluster and network management, responsible for 40 employees and an annual budget of about 5 mio €. Werner is an international expert in cluster management and in the plastics industry, he has established the Upper Austrian Plastics Cluster since 1999 (a plastic industrial network of about 400 contributing companies). His main competences are situated in the fields of general management, project management, institutional development, workshop trainings and moderation. Werner has a science (M.Sc. in automation engineering, University of Applied Science, Wels) and a business administration (M.B.A. University of Toronto) university degree, various training and education in organisational development and lived in the United States for 1 year. Werner lives with his wife and son in Upper Austria.

Dr. Örjan Sölvell

is Professor of International Business at the Stockholm School of Economics, SSE, and Associate Dean of the SSE PhD programs. Since 2005 he is the Director of the Center for Strategy and Competitiveness (www.sse.edu/csc).
 
Dr Sölvell has been active at SSE for more than 25 years, and was Director for the Institute of International Business, IIB, between 1994 and 2002, and the first Dean of the SSE MBA program. 
 
Dr Sölvell’s academic background includes studies at the Stockholm School of Economics (BSc -79; PhD -87), George Washington University (IB -81) and the Harvard Business School (VIS -82). 
 
Since the mid-1980s Dr Sölvell has worked closely with Professor Michael E Porter, studying international competitiveness and clusters in various nations and regions, and he is a Senior Institute Associate at Professor Porter’s Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness at Harvard Business School.
In 2001-2002 Dr Sölvell created a new course together with Professor Porter, “Microeconomics of Competitiveness: Firms, Clusters and Economic Development” (MOC), taught at HBS and some forty universities around the world.
 
Dr Sölvell has published in the areas of strategy, competition, competitiveness and clusters. In 1991 he introduced the concept of clusters and the diamond model to Sweden through his book co- authored with Michael E Porter and Ivo Zander, Advantage Sweden. He published together with Christian Ketels and Göran Lindqvist, the widely acclaimed Cluster Initiative Greenbook in 2003 (available at www.cluster-research.org/greenbook.htm). He is also a co-author with Christian Ketels for the State of the Region Report presented annually at the Baltic Development Forum (www.bdforum.org). Dr Sölvell’s latest book, Clusters—Balancing Evolutionary and Constructive Forces, was published in 2009 (available at www.cluster-research.org/redbook.htm).
 
Dr Sölvell is involved in policy work in Sweden. He also serves on the advisory board of TCI, The Competitiveness Institute (www.competitiveness.org).

Mr. Alain Riedo

Since 2010, Alain Riedo is Managing Director of the Chamber of Commerce Fribourg which includes more than 800 companies representing 45’000 employees in the Canton of Fribourg.

He is President of the Science and Technology Centre of the Canton of Fribourg (PST-FR) since 2009. The PST-FR is an initiative for cluster activation and support. The project is part of the new regional innovation policy (NPR) of the canton of Fribourg.

Until 2009, he has served during 15 years as Sr. Vice President and General Manager of an international Group worldwide leader in the Electronics industry. This innovative company with a fast growing rate develops, produces and sells components for the storage and transportation of electrical energy.

He obtained diplomas in Electrotechnical Engineering (1981) and Business Management (1986). He serves as board member to a number of companies and organizations.  

Mr. Christoph Beer

CEO / Partner mundi consulting ag
Cluster-Manager tcbe.ch – ICT Cluster Bern, Switzerland

Christoph Beer is CEO and Partner from mundi consulting ag, Berne, Switzerland. mundi consulting ag exists for 20 years and is today a medium sized consulting company with the following main topics:
Management consulting for public administrations (federation, cantons, communities), public private partnerships and private organizations, institutions and forces; Fact finding for political and strategic decision making (including evaluations); Management of special initiatives, management of associations, management on time, cluster management, project management.

Before he worked 8 years in the field of knowledge and technology transfer, innovation management and cluster management at innoBE AG as member of the management team. He has over 20 years experience in the ICT-Sector and has worked on various positions, for example: international management consulting, project management, development of business applications, hardware oriented programming and R&D in electronics. He has a technical background (electronics and informatics) with a post-graduate education in economics.

He is also the cluster manager of the tcbe.ch – ICT Cluster Bern, Switzerland. tcbe.ch was founded 1996 and is embedded in the regional cluster politics. The cluster has about 200 members in the field of ICT.
Christoph Beer is the Winner of the European Cluster Manager Award of the Year 2008. He is head of the GLOBAL ICT Cluster Managers Group and Research Fellow at Institute for Work and Technology Gelsenkirchen, Germany.

Dr. Christian Tidona

Dr. Christian Tidona is a serial biotech entrepreneur and management coach. He studied biology at the University of Heidelberg and received his PhD in 1999 at the age of 28.
After several years of experience as a founder, managing director and coach of a number of biotech companies such as Multimetrix (Regensburg), Microbionix (Neuried), Cytonet (Weinheim) and Heidelberg Institute for Stem Cell Technology and Experimental Medicine (HI-STEM) he was instrumental in the development of a new economic growth strategy for the biotech cluster Rhine-Neckar (BioRN). Based on this strategy the BioRN cluster was distinguished as one of the five most significant hightech regions in Germany. It was awarded a 40 million Euro grant from the Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) which is now being used for the implementation of the new growth strategy in order to establish BioRN as a leading cluster in Europe in the field of medical biotechnology.

Since 2008 Dr. Tidona holds the position of a managing director at the newly founded BioRN Cluster Management company in Heidelberg, a public-private partnership between different organizations in the Rhine-Neckar Metropolitan Region. The company is charged with the coordination, integration, development and marketing of the BioRN cluster and was awarded a 5 million Euro grant from the State of Baden-Wurttemberg for the development of sustainable cluster management structures.

Among other personal commitments Dr. Tidona is a member of the German-Israeli Life Science Committee and a board member of the BioRN Academy in Mannheim.

Mr. Rüdiger Hintze-Schomburg

Mr. Rüdiger Hintze-Schomburg has been the Head of the Industry Department at the Ministry for Economic and Labour Affairs of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, Germany since 2007. He is responsible for the management and coordination of the Aviation Cluster Metropolitan Region of Hamburg that was one of the five winners of the “Spitzencluster” Competition held by the Federal Ministry for Education and Research in 2008. He is further concerned with strategy development for networks, technology and innovation support, and economy-oriented policy development for the aerospace and maritime industry in Hamburg.

Mr. Hintze-Schomburg has been with the public administration of the City of Hamburg for over 10 years, holding positions such as Deputy Head of the State Authority for Aviation at the Ministry for Economic and Labour Affairs (2004–2007) and in the Working Group “Scientology” at the Hamburg Ministry of the Interior (1998–2004). His academic background is in law, he is a fully qualified lawyer.

Prof. Dr. Pablo Collazzo

Prof. Dr. Pablo Collazzo has an extensive academic and professional experience in the sustainable competitiveness arena. He is the Director of the Institute for Responsible Competitiveness at Nyenrode University, where he also leads the Executive MBA program. Before joining Nyenrode, he was Director of Academic Affairs at the European Academy of Business in Society. Prior to that he developed a career in investment banking and later in strategy consulting. He has served as board member/advisor to a number of companies and remains Strategic Advisor in Sustainable Competitiveness for the Latin American Program to the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO).

His academic background is in law and economics, with graduate studies at Boston University (MBA) and ESADE (PhD). Both his teaching and research are on sustainable competitiveness, strategic leadership and corporate governance. He held visiting positions at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, ESADE and the Vienna University of Economics and is a regular speaker to diverse audiences on competitiveness and sustainability.

Ambassador Dr. Eric Scheidegger

Ambassador Eric Scheidegger, Dr. rer. pol., SECO Deputy Director since 01.02.2007 and head of the Promotion Activities Directorate since 01.10.2003. Previously head of SECO's Location Promotion Division from 01.06.2002. Prior to that, economic policy consultant to Federal Councillor Pascal Couchepin from 1998. Member of the NZZ economic editorial staff from 1994 to 1998. Staff member of the «Gesellschaft zur Förderung der schweizerischen Wirtschaft» (association for the development of the Swiss economy) from 1992 to 1994.

Prof. Dominique Foray

Dominique Foray is Full Professor at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and holds the Chair of Economics and Management of Innovation (CEMI).

For the last four years, he served as chairman of the expert group “Knowledge for Growth”; a group of prominent economists created to advise Commissioner J. Potocnik (European Commission, DG research).

He is a member of the National Research Council (Switzerland); the Advisory Board of the Swiss Economic Institute (KOF) and the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council.

He served as the 2009-President of the EPIP (European Policy for Intellectual Property – www.epip.eu) association.

D. Foray research interests include all topics and issues related to the economics and management of technology, knowledge and innovation at both the micro and macro levels. This broad field covers the economics of science and technology with a particular focus on high tech sectors, the management of large-scale technological projects, international comparisons of institutions, and systems of innovation within the context of the new economy. Intellectual property and competition policies, information technology and the new economy, capital market and entrepreneurship, national systems of innovation are fields of high relevance in his research.

D. Foray is recognized as one of the leading academic experts in the economics of innovation and knowledge and economic policy implications of the new knowledge-based economy and has presented many opening speeches and key note addresses in academic and policy conferences on these topics.

Prof. Dr. Ana Teresa Tavares-Lehmann

Ana Teresa Lehmann is Vice-President of the North of Portugal’s Regional Coordination and Development Commission, responsible for areas related to Economic Development, Internationalisation, Innovation and International Cooperation. One of her areas of focus is the promotion of Creative Industries. A former Pro-Rector for Strategic Planning and Associate Professor of International Economics at the University of Porto, Visiting Professor in several US/European universities, she has a MSc, PhD and postdoctoral studies specialising on International Business/Foreign Direct Investment and Internationalisation.

Author of numerous presentations in top-level conferences and expert meetings, she is an Associate Editor (Strategy/International Business) of international scientific journals and has published widely in international journals and books. She is also the President of the European International Business Academy. Ana has developed a career also as a consultant to leading international institutions (OECD, UNCTAD, among others) and to Portuguese policy-making organisations, as well as being involved in the management of several companies and foundations. She has received several awards for scientific merit and career recognition.

Prof. Jacques P. Bersier

Since 2003, Prof. Bersier has been the vice director of the College of Engineering and Architecture of Fribourg (EIA-FR) which is part of the HES-SO (University of Applied Sciences of Western Switzerland). He is also Director for Applied Research and Development. Prior to that, he had been teaching Mechanics and Numerical Simulation for 24 years.

He obtained diplomas in Mechanical and Electrotechnical Engineering (1975, 1978) and a diploma in Business Informatics at the University of Fribourg (1994). He  launched and has coordinated the Plastics Processing Cluster since 2005 and the Science and Technology Centre of the Canton of Fribourg (PST-FR) since 2009. The PST-FR is an initiative for cluster activation and support. The project is part of the new regional innovation policy (NPR) of the canton of Fribourg.

Since 2009, Mr. Bersier is member of the Scientific Advisory Board for the universities of applied sciences of the Swiss Center of Accreditation and Quality Assurance in Higher Education (OAQ) and affiliated member of the Center for Competitiveness of the University of Fribourg.