British Alumni for innovation and competitiveness in the V4 countries

Guest blog by Dr. Zoltán Csedő, Member of the Board, Hungarian Association of British Alumni.

It was a great privilege to launch the www.britishalumni.org knowledge-sharing portal at the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, on Wednesday 18 December. MFA Deputy State Secretary Gergely Prőhle hosted the launch event with British Ambassador Jonathan Knott. Ambassadors of the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia were also present and showed great interest for our innovative plans.

This regional initiative of the Hungarian Association of British Alumni (HABA) is also a flagship project of the Hungarian Presidency of the Visegrad Co-operation, co-sponsored by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office and International Visegrad Fund.

Celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Chevening Scholarship Fund, we’d like to reconnect British alumni within the V4 countries, encouraging them to share their knowledge for the benefit of the society, to boost innovation and competitiveness within the V4 countries.

The www.britishalumni.org portal and related smartphone applications provide a platform for knowledge-sharing and policy dialogue for more than 800 British alumni and local stakeholders in Central Europe in key strategic issues such as energy security, healthcare reform, sustainable financial services, research and development, manufacturing and technology.

We also offer innovative internal networking platforms to the regional British alumni community. They are able to post blogs, as well as British alumni related events and job offers across Visegrad countries.

“The British government is excited by this opportunity to engage more closely with the V4. This project is exciting, because it will help us mobilize citizens of Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia who have studied in the UK with British government scholarships to review how best our countries, their governments, businesses and civil society can collaborate and support each other. I hope this will signal the beginning of a bright new chapter for British involvement in the region,” British Ambassador Jonathan Knott said at the lunch event.

The great interest for professional networking and knowledge sharing opportunities within the V4 alumni community justifies Ambassador Knott’s high expectations. Our next event goes live within a month: the V4 British alumni community invites government officials and industry professionals of the Visegrad countries and UK to attend an innovative webinar on V4 energy industry and energy policy challenges, moderated from Brussels. We are going to focus on EU’s 2030 energy and climate change strategies in the mirror of competitiveness of the Visegrad countries, on the 23rd January 2014.

I hope you’ll be a regular visitor of our www.britishalumni.org knowledge-sharing portal. Wishing you a merry Christmas and a very happy New Year, we look forward to seeing you at our events in 2014.