The first plenary session “Sustainable goals” kicked off with an opening welcome video including speeches of CSS Host – Teresa Mendes, President of Instituto Pedro Nunes, CSS Chair – Helena Freitas, Professor at the University of Coimbra, CSS Co-chair – Raimund Bröchler, DIATOMIC Coordination Team, and Senior Research & Innovation Manager at INTRASOFT International and CSS Organizer – António Damasceno, Block.IS Coordinator at F6S, providing an overview of the CSS event, DIATOMIC project, and our activities to all of the CSS participants.

Moreover, the introduction was followed by P1 CSS moderator – Mladen Radišić, Professor at the University of Novi Sad and Team Leader at InoSens. He has done the warm welcome to all participants where he introduced them with the aim of the P1 session and the whole concept of 2 weeks CSS as well as speakers.

CSS Chair Mrs. Helena Freitas opened the P1 session with her presentation as a first speaker. She is a Full Professor of Biodiversity and Ecology at the Department of Life Sciences of the Faculty of Sciences and Technology of the University of Coimbra since 2003 and holds the UNESCO Chair in Biodiversity and Conservation for Sustainable Development since 2014. She brought, from the research side, what are the SDGs and big challenges for the policy and green deal as well as some examples of the specific technologies, i.e. how tech can help us to address the needs in the short term since the need for the answers and solutions of digital technologies is nowadays urgent in order to build the sustainable and fair future.

The session continued by the presentation of Mrs. Fiorina Murione as our second speaker. Fiorina is Regional Director at GDSI company, Ireland. Participated in UNCTAD assistance to the Silk Road project by providing advisory services, and part of the team organizing the World Investment Forum since inception. She poses consolidated experience of 25 years in the field of development cooperation by combining policy analysis, research, monitoring and evaluation. From her side the lessons from various strategies has been shared, including innovative solutions, with a view towards developing models that can be adopted and adapted to individual countries’ needs since developing entrepreneurship is a key element of strategies that support the attainment of the SDGs, particularly SDG9 (INDUSTRY, INNOVATION, AND INFRASTRUCTURE), to build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation. Moreover, it was examined how targeted government policy, including through public-private partnerships, can help build modern communications and Internet infrastructure to facilitate growth, development and innovation.

The presentations was followed by a Q&A session between our participants and the CSS panellists including the everyone in the conversation using the Poll Everywhere through pollev.com interactive concept, which led to fruitful discussions and useful conclusions on the relevant topics to our CSS participants.

At the end, the CSS’s P1 session also included Brokerage session which was the period where all desired participants had a chance to in brief present themselves, their organization and what are they looking for. The Brokerage session was an opportunity for the participants to network as well as business opportunities within their industries and sectors which go beyond CSS. This is one of the key aspects of such events because it provided our participants with a great opportunity to interact by facilitating quality networking and raising the potential for new business deals and ventures.

All in all, it was an exciting session that facilitated exchange of valuable information, sharing of ideas and networking with creative people, and we can’t wait for our event to continue!