ANPEI 30th Anniversary, 28&29 April 2014, Sao Paulo, Brazil

ANPEI, the Brazilian equivalent to EIRMA, celebrated its 30th anniversary this April in Sao Paulo and the whole W-FIRA (Korea, Japan, Australia, Europe, with the exception of the US) was present.

As ANPEI started its first real Annual conference 14 years ago with a few "members of the club", they now reached out to about 2000 R&D people in industry, academic, research centers, governmental agencies and the likes.

Roughly 1500 people attended this 2 day event with a few main sessions and a number of parallel sessions, most with real time interpretation (Portuguese - English) in one of Sao Paulo's main exhibition centres.

The theme was "Modelos de negocios competitivos", meaning that we all share the same concerns.

Communication Apps, Twitter interventions and much more shows that Brazil has definitely entered the knowledge society.

The choice of keynote speakers was eclectic (Victor Hwang, executive director of T2 venture creation, from Silicon Valley, Nancy Tennant, vice-president innovation at Whirlpool, etc...and of course the W-Fira members: Leonie Walsh for Australasia, Ieehwan Kim for Korea, Yoshiaki Nakamura for Japan, and Eirma's secretary general, Michel Judkiewicz).

The debate of the W-Fira attracted a lot of interest as one of the issues in Brazil is a somewhat historical autarcic development, partly due to the limited amount of people speaking a foreign language and English particularly.

A great networking event for all our W-Fira associations around the world with all participants happy and an additional boost to that World Federation of Industrial Research Associations, created a year ago in Washington.

NB: all the yellow T-shirts are prototypes for the Football World Cup and wear the number 10.