On March 21, 2024, the SIXAGON team visited Cegléd, where this year's Urban21 conference series focused on the role of talent retention and social innovation. The conference was organised by the Network for Regional Development Foundation within the framework of the National Laboratory for Social Innovation (TINLAB), whose President, Szabolcs Hollósi, in his opening speech, highlighted the urgent need for 21st century municipalities to identify, nurture and retain talent. The conference opened with a keynote speech by Krisztián Steigervald, a generation researcher, who explored the challenges and opportunities of intergenerational cooperation through a wide range of examples, ultimately pointing out that, just as in a family and a workplace, it is the alignment of the individual perspectives of different generations that strengthens a community of a city.
 |  |  |
 |  |  |
 |  |  |
We listened with interest to Andrea Varga, Deputy Mayor of the City of Miskolc, who gave a presentation on the 4IM project's experiences so far and the challenges facing Miskolc, and with the help of Béla Kézy (MEGAKOM Strategic Consulting Office) it was good to get a glimpse of European good practices in talent attraction and retention. We saw creative, innovative and easily adaptable examples that had in common that municipalities had recognised their own strengths and thus managed to reach out to talent in a self-identical way.
The Urban21 conference was also the occasion to present the winning projects of TINLAB's Social Innovator competition. Two round-table discussions were held to introduce the idea generators who were given the opportunity to develop their projects at the end of the selection process. We were delighted that our project manager, Eszter Miklós, was one of the selected innovators with her project idea "Be a Number Queen!", and will develop the drama education programme with the professional support of SIXAGON in the next six months. The pilot developments are aligned with TINLAB's focus areas - Social impact of digitalisation; Culture, competence and human capital; Social innovations for quality of life; Social innovation methodologies. The "Be a Number Queen!" project idea is detailed in our previous post.
In the closing panel discussion of the conference, development policy experts and representatives of NGOs from small communities discussed the complex concept of talent, the importance of recognising talent and good practices for retaining young or older talent in the community.
We thank the organisers for the valuable presentations and discussions, we were interested to learn about good practices in talent attraction and retention in Europe and in our country, and we were happy to build our professional network.
