Upcoming Events

We designed a simulation game to work with and experiment with the design principles for knowledge productivity. Recently we met Frans van Gassel, from the Technical University in Eindhoven (TU/E), and he invited us to collaborate with him to prepare a game for the 4th symposium on Value Development in Construction Management. The students-association of Course takes the initiative for this conference together with the Masterprogramma Construction Management and Engineering (Frans van Gassel). The game takes place at June 7, in the morning. In the afternoon some lecturers (my colleague Paul Keursten is one of them!) will reflect on the symposium's main theme 'creatief vragen en aanbieden', Paul Keursten in his speech will reflect upon the morning programma where we worked with the design principles.

Recently I found out about The European Association for Creativity and Innovation (E.A.C.I.). They want "to contribute to a better understanding, practice and acceptance of creativity and innovation in Europe". It looks really interesting. Not too single focused on creativity and inventions: innovation has an important place. The 10th European Conference for Creativity and Innovation (ECCI X) will be held in October this year in Copenhagen. I consider going there. They have the ambition to make a combination of both academic and business. They announce creative forms to be used in the 'paper jam sessions'. I like that! No more sessions on learning on innovation where you don't learn anything or that are not innovative at all. It's about time for the form of these conferences to become equal and similar with their themes.

I just announced innoday and now look at this: innotown. It's getting better all the time. Innotown is Norway´s annual innovation conference: "InnoTown is a truly unusual business conference for people who want to open up to the new opportunities that lie beyond the traditionally tried and tested". The programma looks very diverse. With subjects like:

• The business value of cross-cultural innovation.
• Finding the spark: A Cirque du Soleil Approach to Managing Talent

March 29 in the Amsterdam Convention Factory Innoday will take place. Looks like a cool event (althoug in Dutch). Focused on businesslife; Research on innovation is not scheduled as such.

For those who can make up their minds quickly: The ERIMA Symposium takes place March 15-16 and short papers (4 pages) need to be submitted by January 31. The first day of the symposium in Biarritz will focus on industrial needs, future challenges, storytelling and case studies exploring innovative management best practices. The second day will be oriented towards new organisations, concepts, methods and tools proposed by the research community and practitioners to promote innovative management.

From the website I get the idea that they really have the ambition to make it an interactive symposium. There are no traditional paper presentations but "the chairmen of sessions will present the main contribution of each selected paper and start a round-table discussion across different questions and topics. Each contributor will be invited to clarify his/her point of view during the discussion". Sounds promising, and just what we need: a conference with innovation as a main topic, should indeed work on innovative ways of working during the gathering. Just as conferences that have learning as main topic should promote ways of working that stimulate participants' learning.

I received the call for papers for the Eighth International Conference on HRD Research and Practice across Europe. This year the conference is hosted by the Oxford Brookes University. This year's theme is 'Globalisation versus Glocalisation: implications for HRD?'. The call for papers is attached to this post. More information can be found on the conference-website. I have been to the last conferences in Limerick, Leeds and Tilburg. I have always had great fun and met interesting people. What I like about the conferences is hearing about actual research of HRD-researchers in the field. In general the learning perspective takes a prominent role in the paper presentations. And: good news is that the PhD-workshop that I organised last year in Tilburg is scheduled again!

The Gallup International Positive Psychology Summit will take place in Washington DC, USA, from October 5-7, 2006. This conference on positive psychology attracts many cool speakers such as Richard Florida and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
Positive psychology set in in the 90s with Martin Seligman as one of its founders. Before then, psychology was pointed towards pathology, and curing mental illnesses. The focus of positive psychology, in contrast, lies on identifying and nurturing talent. The school of positive psychology becomes popular in various areas like organisation development (Cameron, Dutton, & Quinn, 2003), evaluation research (Preskill & Coghlan, 2003) and in thinking about organisational change (Whitney & Trosten-Bloom, 2003). Although this way of thinking became popular only recently, it is built on concepts that have been proven earlier to play an important role in the learning process such as self-efficacy.

The Dutch network participatory action research organises a conference on the subject of participatory research: ALARMP 7th & PAR 11th World Congress. It takes place in Groningen (The Netherlands), from August 21-25 2006. The central theme of this World Congress is: Standards and Ethics in participatory research. Attention is also paid to the role of participatory research as a means of (self) reflection. There are already 336 participants, and as you can see at the website, they are from various countries in the world. This promises to be an interesting conference with speakers who are specialised in different areas (how nice to meet a research and evaluation theorist or how would it be to have a coffee with a professor in the area of identity and talent and network organisations).

The central theme of the International HRD Conference 2006 is The Learning Society for sustainable development. This conference has all the ingredients to become a great success. There are several interesting and innovative subthemes such as Learning and the generation gap; The workplace as a place for learning and Learning from the future.

The contributions are very diverse (not only paper presentations but also workshops, round tables etc) and the keynote speakers are promising. Among others Joseph Kessels will speak, Trude Maas and Regina Mulder. Last but not least the conference takes place in Amsterdam!

This summer, 28-30 August, the ISMICK conference takes place in South Africa (Stellenbosch). This year's conference theme is knowledge productivity. We (my colleagues Marloes van Rooij, Joseph Kessels and me) will be there and give a workshop in which we will work actively with the design principles. We start with the performance of five monologues in which people who participate in an innovation practice tell their story. Then we will work with the design principles that can be found in this monologue. Finally we’ll look for interventions to promote knowledge productivity. More information about the conference can be found on the ISMICK-website.