28-30 June, Turin, Italy. International Symposium on International Migration and Development, in preparation for the UN General Assembly High Level Dialogue on International Migration and Development, to be held in New York on 14 and 15 September 2006. Wendy Hansen made a presentation at the session on Knowledge and Migration.

June 28, Brussels Belgium. Final workshop of the PORCH (Patterns of Organisational Change in European Industry) project. The overall goal of this project is to provide suggestions for surveying organisational innovation on a European level including a special focus on different industry sectors. Hugo Hollanders made a presentation on the European Innovation Scoreboard approach to include indicators on organisational innovation.

23 June, Geneva, Switzerland. UNDP planning meeting for the South-South Cooperation in Science and Technology. Luc Soete and Anthony Bartzokas participated at the meeting, and are coordinating UNU-MERIT contribution to the report.

20 June, Brussels, Belgium. Mutual Learning Platform (MLP) Workshop on "How to perform Regional Innovation Benchmarking". The Mutual Learning Platform is part of the "Innovating Regions in Europe" network. Hugo Hollanders made a presentation on the European Regional Innovation Scoreboard.

Official launch of UNU-MERIT's regional LINK (Learning, INovation, Knowledge) Network in South Asia. The network promotes understanding of the nature of pro-poor rural innovation capacity and works with regional and international organizations to design interventions that can strengthen this capacity. More details will be available soon on the network's website

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27 June: Ganeshan Wignaraja, Senior Economist at the Asian Development Bank in the Philippines presented recent work on the Sri Lankan textile sector, that sustained foreign investment since 1977 has had a positive impact on local technological capability - as demonstrated in the export performance of Sri Lankan firms. Drawing on a newly constructed technology index, he analysed the prospects for continued innovation in an increasingly liberalized global environment.

28 June: "With hindsight, no event in history is predictable," noted Prof. Francis Wilson, of University of Cape Town, School of economics, at the start of a fascinating political-economy analysis of the complex set of interacting factors that led to the political transformation of South Africa in the early 1990s. The presentation titled Half way there: the long walk to freedom and economic justice in South Africa , was an insightful insider perspective of the long struggle interspersed with anecdotes of the key personalities involved, and addressing the enduring legacy of apartheid - unequal development, low education levels among the black majority, rising unemployment, and regional instability.