Summit Meeting for Progressive Regions
St. Pölten UAS Supports Symposium and New Innovation Centre in St. Jakob in Defereggen
With the 1st summit meeting for progressive regions, the new hotel, research and communication centre “FoKus N’Cyan” of the association “N'Cyan. Innovation für Menschen“ was opened under the motto “Zukunft im FoKus“ (focus on the future).
Over the three days of the symposium, approximately 80 experts from the fields of business, science, art, culture, and society as well as citizens of the region came together in East Tyrol to share their knowledge and experiences. The St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences was actively involved as a founding member and regular contributor.
Connecting the Power of the Origins with the Digital Future
In the association “N'Cyan – Innovation für Menschen“, Austrian leading companies dedicate themselves to questions in the field of tension between regional roots and digital innovation. The objective of the association is to combine the power of the origins with the digital future. To do this, it offers an innovative platform to research the interrelationships between digital technologies and original energy. Last week, N’Cyan opened the hotel, research and communication centre “FoKus” in St. Jakob in Defereggen in East Tyrol with a symposium.
The association’s board welcomed numerous guests and dignitaries to the festive opening, among them Martha Schultz, vice president of the Austrian Economic Chamber, GEA majority shareholder Heini Staudinger, and a number of top managers of prominent companies as well as representatives of numerous research institutions. The concept and several presentations and programme items came from the St. Pölten UAS.
FoKus N'Cyan – N'Cyan board of directors, left to right: Egon Kleinlercher, Hubert Jesacher, Walter Troger, Hannes Raffaseder | Foto: Philipp Brunner / Brunner Images
Innovative Real-World Lab
The new centre will feature an innovative real-world lab for an exemplary digital transition of rural regions. The vision of the association N’Cyan is to promote digitalisation through empathy and empower the population through digital tools.
Surrounded by the mountains of the Hohe Tauern National Park in East Tyrol, the new hotel, research and communication centre FoKus provides new spaces for inspiring encounters, for learning together and from each other, and for furthering joint ideas and designing a sustainable future in the digital age. FoKus is not only the homebase of N’Cyan but is open for many kinds of research, innovation, further education, and communication activities by and with various partners.
Kickoff at the Symposium
On the occasion of this opening, the association made a promising new beginning with the symposium “Zukunft im FoKus”. This first N’Cyan summit meeting for progressive regions created exciting opportunities for informal exchange, personal conversations, creative ideas, inspiring impulses, future-oriented concepts, and exemplary initiatives. Young talents, enthusiastic forward thinkers, and application-oriented change makers met renowned experts from the science, education, business, art and culture sectors as well as decision-makers from administration and politics.
By exchanging experiences, know-how and ideas across the boundaries of disciplines, sectors and generations, the participants worked together on new perspectives for a digital and sustainable society. In the context of future-oriented regions, experts held lectures on digital (future) technologies, innovation strategies and new business models, new paths in (further) education and (team)work, and sustainable concepts for tourism, logistics and mobility.
St. Pölten UAS Strongly Involved
Several experts of the St. Pölten UAS participated in “Zukunft im FoKus”. Keynote speeches were held by Franz Fidler, Head of the Department of Media & Digital Technologies, Susanne Roiser, Head of the Department of Digital Business & Innovation, and Johannes Pflegerl, Head of the Ilse Arlt[AA1] Institute for Social Inclusion Research. Hannes Raffaseder, member of the Executive Board of the St. Pölten UAS and Scientific Director of N’Cyan, was responsible for the detailed concept as the creative mind behind the symposium.
“With ‘Zukunft im FoKus’, we are setting an important impulse for an intensive exploration of our region’s diverse possibilities. In this context, we exploit the chance of a digital change that gives centre stage to people and the environment. As N’Cyan is also an associated partner of our European University E³UDRES², the resulting insights and new ideas will not only be of regional importance but create an added value at the European level as well. The close collaboration with the other regular N’Cyan members and the possibilities offered by the new ‘FoKus’ are a great opportunity for our university of applied sciences to forge ahead with exciting developments for sustainable digital regions”, Hannes Raffaseder is convinced.
Association N‘Cyan
N'Cyan was founded in the spring of 2019. From the very beginning, regular members included large, internationally active companies as well as regional partners and research institutions. The association defines itself as a future-oriented platform for open innovation and brings together its regular members and other stakeholders with the goal of building bridges between digitalisation, urbanity, globalisation on the one hand, and the manifold potentials of rural regions with their high quality of life and comparably high societal resilience.
