What makes a science and innovation cluster thrive, and how can regions scale their global impact? This seminar explores two of the world’s leading innovation clusters, Tokyo-Yokohama and China’s Greater Bay Area, ranked among the top clusters in WIPO’s Global Innovation Cluster Index. Drawing on interviews and new reports from the Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education (STINT), Executive Director Dr. Andreas Göthenberg will share perspectives from STINT’s Science Intelligence work on global science and innovation, followed by presentations from Dr. Laura Barbieri and Dr. Erik Forsberg on the ecosystems, strengths, and development trajectories of these two regions.

Speakers:

Dr. Andreas Göthenberg was appointed Executive Director of STINT as of September 1, 2009. And since 2024, he has been a Board Member at the Karolinska Institutet, Sweden. He received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, in 1996 and 2003, respectively. 

From 2006 until 2009, he was a Science and Technology Attaché at the Embassy of Sweden in Tokyo, Japan. Before that, he worked as a Center Manager and Senior Researcher in China, setting up joint research and education centers for KTH Royal Institute of Technology at Zhejiang University and Fudan University.
 

Dr. Laura Barbieri is a STINT Science Fellow in Japan and South Korea. Based in Tokyo, she is currently a Visiting Scholar at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS). Previously, she was a JSPS Postdoctoral Fellow at Osaka Metropolitan University, where she conducted malaria immunology research within the SATREPS JICA Project in collaboration with Kenyan and Japanese partners.

Dr. Barbieri holds a PhD in Experimental Immunology from the University of Padova (Italy), carried out with Karolinska Institutet (Sweden), and a Master’s degree in Medical Biotechnologies from Padova in collaboration with King’s College London (UK). She also worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Cambridge (UK) and was a Visiting Researcher at the University of Tokyo (Japan).
 

Dr. Erik Forsberg has been the STINT Representative in Asia since 2018. He has worked in China for more than 17 years, and was the Founding Vice Director of the Sino–Swedish Joint Research Center of Photonics as well as a Postdoctoral Fellow and an Associate Professor at Zhejiang University, China.

Dr. Forsberg was the Founding Graduate Dean at the Higher Colleges of Technology (United Arab Emirates) and a Visiting Scientist at Hokkaido University (Japan). Currently, he is an Adjunct Associate Professor at Zhejiang University and a Visiting Research Associate at the University of Malaya (Malaysia). In parallel with his academic work, he has been active in industry and entrepreneurship in China, co-founding several startups.

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