RED 2022 keynote speaker is Zsolt Bedo, PhD, the director of innovation and associate professor at the Faculty of Business and Economics at the University of Pecs.

As an associate professor he conducts research in the area of university centered entrepreneurial ecosystems and on platform business model innovations. Bedo with coauthors developed the conceptual framework for the university centered entrepreneurial ecosystem, published in the Journal of Small Business and Enterprise Development in 2020, which allowed him and his colleagues to create a protocol, registered as a know-how that enables universities to self-assess their entrepreneurial and innovation ecosystems and their platform readiness. As a continuation of the self-assessment protocol, universities can have access to the ecosystem management tool developed by Bedo and his colleagues named https://www.openup.education/. Universities that implement openup.education solution and choose to organize innovative capacity building events to boost university wide entrepreneurship, like hackathons, can have access to the curriculum of the hackathon event and also to the online tool that is to measure the entrepreneurial attitude transformation of hackathon participants. This assessment tool enables universities to learn more about the entrepreneurial discovery process hackathon participants’ progress through.

Bedo is the co-founder of the Simonyi BEDC Entrepreneurship Center and the Center for Applied Learning unit of the Business Faculty. He has raised close to 1,5 million EURO of development funding (e.g.) Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership, H2020) from EU and from national sources to develop the university centered entrepreneurial ecosystem at the University of Pecs.

The topic of the keynote speech is: “University as the platform of entrepreneurial activity”.