FAWORIT 2016-2017 · Fascinating World of Researchers in the Age of Technology 2016/2017 - The New Generation of Innovators

Fascinating World of Researchers in the Age of Technology 2016/2017 - The New Generation of Innovators

The main objectives of “FAWORIT 2016-2017”, the European Researchers’ Night in Hungary in 2017, consisted of: • Showing the public how innovative solutions, new products, services, inventions affect our daily lives; • Presenting the creators of innovative solutions: the researchers, their work and career, their personalities, daily life and hobbies with a view to support their public recognition; • Encouraging the youth – with a special focus on girls – to embark on scientific careers by involving young innovators in our programmes; • Highlighting how rewarding it is to change the world, to make real impact on our everyday lives with showing attractive career paths to young innovators. For such a purpose, a very intensive awareness campaign was undertaken. Our main target group was students between the age of 8-20 but we organised programmes for younger children and for their parents, too, as they considerably influence the career decision of children. Most activities, taking place in over 51 different cities, more than 186 different venues with over 2.500 different programmes, focused on the researcher seen through their career and the lively experiences of their scientific life, completed with lots of connected partners, their venues and knowledge and experiences in science. We addressed the lessons learnt from previous Researchers’ Nights by using new, novel methods and solutions. We have experienced in the last years that our activities usually attract well-educated citizens living in larger towns. Therefor we widened the circle of our target group by organising spectacular events on the street, in public places (“Science in the City”). This kind of activity started before the event as part of the awareness raising. This way we could attract another type of audience to our activities, too. By involving contributing partners as the Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME) and Google Ground in our project, we also aimed to reach out to more young people. All the programmes’ and communication strategy’s purpose consisted of illustrating that being a researcher is cool and creative and researchers and young innovators are amongst us. We intended to raise awareness of the European engagement in R&I, therefor in the European Corners and at each venue related programmes of the European Union (FP7, H2020, especially MSCA) were visible. Our visitors’ numbers increased from year to year, and as we attracted this year more than 17.600 people, and with the strong communication strategy we could reached about 1,000,000 people with our message. More than 300 researchers were involved in the activities, 18 of these benefitted from MSC schemes and 33 of these benefitted from EU support (FP7, H2020) other than MSCA.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union