Once there she was invited to join the team as researcher on media education, media literacy and e-learning. While she found the academic life appealing, she eventually was tempted by the publishing industries. She enjoyed every minute of her three-year spree creating contents for children books, providing e-learning consultancy, and managing on-site and virtual training programs.

Then, in 2008, in an interesting twist of events she was offered a job as bid and project coordinator of EU funded projects in Barcelona Media, a technology center. She could not resist the chance to circle back to her research origins! Now, a decade, a merger, and hundreds of proposals later, she finds herself in Eurecat, a non-profit research organization with 43M€ turnover and +600 professionals. There she leads a great team of motivated, visionary and enthusiastic EU program managers. Together they build and realize the R&D funding plan that allows Eurecat to achieve its strategic objectives and technology roadmaps.

She is passionate about technologies that improve people’s life and keeps it all connected with principles of digital and media literacy, training, participatory design, and social innovation.  She dearly enjoys every opportunity for evangelize on the importance of relevant and impactful EU research and innovation projects for addressing societal challenges. She is still in charge of all projects related to technologies for the creative and cultural industries in Eurecat. As of 2019, she is part of the Steering Board of the New European Media Initiative (NEM-initiative.org)

“It is an imperative task to find, cherish and expand that precious cooperation space in which both technologies and the arts thrive.”

Aggregation is not something that could be easily and spontaneously realised. For this reason, I believe that national initiatives are mostly needed to create a critical mass of actors working straightforward to agree on a common aim for the sector. Then, the next step would be to link national initiatives all around Europe for a stronger advocacy for the sector itself on a European level. This is why we are aiming for the Italian Manifesto, a spin-off initiative of the Thearts+ Manifesto that we would like to share and expand even in other European countries”.

She holds a bachelor and a master’s degree in Political Science from the University of Naples L’Orientale and a PhD in Economic Geography from the University of Rome La Sapienza. During the PhD she worked mainly on Network of Firms and forms of Proximity among SMEs with specific focus on Innovation.Currently, Simona is partner and senior researcher of T6 Ecosystems srl. Since 2015, she has participated in responsible positions in more than 10 European projects funded by the European Commission under the research frameworks FP7 and H2020. She is mainly in charge of policy analysis, participatory processes for policy development and impact assessment analysis. She is currently deeply involved in the research community on social media and disinformation being also an active member of the Media community at European level, as Vice-chair for Liaison of the European Technology Platform funded by the European Commission, New European Media Initiative (NEM).

After a degree in History and German Literature & Linguistics studies, Hermann Eckel started a career in the publishing sector as a sales manager with Baerenreiter and Oxford University Press. From 2010 to 2016 he acted as Managing Director at Edition Peters Group. After an interims period at Medienforen Leipzig he took over as Managing Director at tolino media, a subsidiary of the large German book chains, in December 2017. Besides that he has been co-spokesperson of the IG Digital with the Boersenverein since the beginning of 2019.

Yvan is passionate about bridging artistic and tech talents who invent jointly new ways to create, discover, experience and monetize Creative Content. 

"Innovation must rhyme with Solution, Experimentation and Inclusion, not Disruption."

He holds a MSc in Economics and Management from the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan and a PhD in Industrial Economics from Université Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne. He has led several projects for European Commission, Unesco, Google, etc. His main research interests are cultural diversity, media innovation, wearables and the economic impact of digital technology on cultural industries.

"We are too focused on promoting technological innovation, we forget how important content innovation is. That is why we need schemes to bridge the gaps between creativity and R&D at the European level."

It is for this reason that we are proposing the setting up of a Creative Innovation Lab from the new programme."Spanish born Lucia Recalde is Head of the Audiovisual Industry and Media Support Programmes unit in the Directorate General DG for Communications Networks, Content and Technology (CNECT) of the European Commission. Prior to that, she was a part of the management of the DG for Education and Culture (EAC) as Head of Unit for Higher Education, Innovation, Entrepreneurship and the EIT (the European Institute for Innovation and Technology). Ms Recalde joined the European Commission in 1995 and until 2006 served the DG for Employment and Social Affairs in various positions. She started her career as policy officer at the Directorate of European Affairs of the Basque Government.

By doing so, we might become attractive partners for strong players of other sectors in EU economy as most of them need to create contents and communicate values. And this is precisely one of our best skills." Alejandra began her career in the audiovisual sector as TV journalist and producer of documentaries and films, based in Argentina and Germany.

But what she always loved was to find out new ways of creating stories. In the early ‘90s she found herself immersed in the launch of one of the first online service providers in America (UOL) and enjoyed quite primitive experiences in live video chats with those few young people who could afford a 56k dial-up subscription. She could definitely merge her love by audiovisual contents and online technologies when she moved to Spain and joined the Catalan Public Broadcasting Corporation (CCMA) to work on the R+D team in the creation and exploitation of multiplatform contents and live mobile +TV channels and looking for different ways of monetization. Since then, connectivity, mobiles, tablets, apps, software… everything became accessible to almost anyone, challenging us to conceive new ways of doing business in the era of social media, sharing platforms, UGC when disruptive innovation changes the way we think and we behave.

Living in Brussels for the last decade, she joined Mediapro Group and belongs to the Board of Directors where she helps in the evolution of the Group’s business. Mediapro is one of the biggest independent producers in Europe working globally in the creation and exploitation of live top sports, feature film and tv contents. Invoicing around 2B€ only in audiovisuals, Mediapro works to become as innovative as needed to remain close to people by using audiovisual communication.