Madrid, Spain, May 09, 2013 - Spain is running a seminar in Beijing to show senior Chinese civil servants that innovation is key to competitiveness.

A seminar has been held in Beijing on “Innovation and competitiveness policies” as part of a collaboration agreement that ICEX has signed with the Central Party School of the Communist Party – the institution where all the country’s top civil servants train. This bilateral event is one of the programmes scheduled under the agreement with the School of the Communist Party and is based on programmes carried out in Spain over the past 30 years.

Major speakers took part in this seminar, which was inaugurated by the CEO of ICEX, Coriseo González-Izquierdo, and the President of the ICO, Román Escolano. These included Spain’s Secretary General for Innovation, Science and Technology, Marisa Poncela, and the head of the Airbus R&D centre in China, Pedro Fernández-Rodríguez. They made it clear that internationalisation and innovation are two sides of the same coin: innovative companies compete better in international markets and companies exposed to international competition become more innovative.

The seminar was in three parts: “Innovation strategies”, “Innovation policy” – which focused on the importance of research, with representatives from Chinese and Spanish universities and research centres – and “Innovation practices”, which described some specific case studies of Spanish companies.

This event shows the level of commitment being made towards a market of such enormous importance to Spanish companies. The aim of this initiative is to create an image of Spain as a modern country with a strong technological component. It also seeks to help Chinese authorities understand Spain’s experience in developing a regulatory framework to encourage business investment and private sector participation in developing sectors that are of priority importance to the Asian giant, such as infrastructure, environment and health.

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