R&D and Innovation Panel “Fikir Meltemi” Organized Online

The last session of “Fikir Meltemi”, a panel discussion series organized by Netaş, a leading technology company in information and communication technologies, put a spotlight on Turkey’s national vision towards building an infrastructure for innovativeness. The panel discussion brought together 33 opinion leaders from different disciplines under the overarching theme of “Turkey’s R&D and Innovation Capacity and How to Develop This Capacity”. Moderated by Hakan Güldağ from Dünya newspaper, the panel discussion took place online. Özyeğin University Rector Prof. Dr. Esra Gençtürk attended the event as an invited speaker. “We have brilliant young people all around Turkey. We have highly respectable, distinguished scientists. In that sense, I do not think we have any capacity limitations in R&D or innovation. However, we have some issues with the input-output relationship. We see it also in the global innovation index. Our education system, families and youth are focused too much on success, seeing university as a profession or a degree only. We need to teach our youth how to learn. Once they learn it, I have immense confidence that they will thrive both in the private sector and around the world,” our Rector Prof. Dr. Gençtürk remarked. The online panel was followed by 5 thousand viewers.