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The FREE Network National Conference “The challenges of public policy to promote entrepreneurship and innovation based on knowledge generated in universities” took place in San José, Costa Rica on 5th December 2018 and over 150 participants came together from Central America.

Organized by the Erasmus+ funded project FREE Network - Fostering Research-based Entrepreneurship and the development of spin-off companies in Central America, of which the University of Alicante is coordinator, the conference was hosted by Universidad Latinoamericana de Ciencia y Tecnología (ULACIT) and was jointly organized with Tecnológico de Costa Rica (TEC).

The main objective of the conference was to promote the project visibility and present the project results, specifically the Innovation Support Offices (ISOs) Network that will be established in the framework of the project.  Also, the aim of the conference was to raise awareness of the key role of the ISOs for supporting spin-off creation in Costa Rica  and Central America. In this sense, the recently established ISOs from ULACIT (The Nest – Innovation Centre)  and TEC (Innovation and Entrepreneurship Centre) were presented by Alejandra Quirós, Associate Director of External Affairs of ULACIT and Juan Carlos Carvajal, Director of the TEC Innovation Centre. 

The V2WORK project, coordinated by the University of Alicante, held its second training of trainers module at the Industrial University of Vinh, in Vinh City, Vietnam. The module, for Career Centre staff from eight universities in Vietnam, was delivered by staff from the University of Alicante and the University of Coimbra from October 16^th to 18^th.

Centred on the Labour Market and the global economy, and the identification of trends on employability for graduates, the training module aimed at:

• Offering knowledge on methodologies and tools for the analysis of labour markets.
• Identifying different strategies for university observatories to improve the career centres’ ability to prepare students and graduates for the labour market.
• Identifying ways to use the labour observatories’ outputs to assess the universities in terms of employability of their students and graduates.

Finding solutions to some of the biggest challenges on how migrants and refugees can access the labour market is the main area of work of the Like Home project. This project has developed several online tools to help migrants and refuges to assess their level of competences in key areas such as literary skills, IT skills and cultural awareness.

The Babelia NGO, Pangea project (local council offices of information to migrant’ people) and the Alicante City Council organized the first workshop on “Learn to evaluate your competences” for migrants and refugees of the city of Alicante. The workshop was successfully implemented in 3 languages Spanish, Russian and Arabic on Friday 5th October at Pangea.  

Hosted by Ho Chi Minh City University of Social Sciences and Humanities (HCM-USSH), the ENHANCE Final Conference "Challenges and Strengths of Research and Innovation Management and Implementation in Vietnam" took place on the 19th and 20th of September 2018, in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, organised by International Project Management Office of the University of Alicante. 

The conference was inaugurated by Dr. Manuel Palomar, Rector University of Alicante who thanked Assoc. Prof. Dr. Ngo Thi Phuong Lan, president of HCM-USSH and her team for hosting this final event and for acting as national coordinator of the ENHANCE project.