ShareJaume Valls Pasola new director of AQU Catalunya
The President of the Agency is to appoint Dr Jaume Valls Pasola as the new director of AQU Catalunya, having passed the open and competitive selection process.
Given that the current director of AQU Catalunya, Martí Casadesús Fa, is ending his second non-renewable four-year term this year, in April the Agency began the process for the selection and appointment of the person who will hold the post of director of AQU Catalunya for the next four years.
The process, which has followed the criteria approved by the AQU Catalunya Governing Council, consisted of three phases: a merit assessment, a project assessment and a personal interview. Dr Valls Pasola passed all the phases of the process, earning him the recommendation of the Selection Committee to the president of AQU Catalunya for director of AQU Catalunya.
Jaume Valls is Professor of Business Organisation at the University of Barcelona and has also worked at the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC) and the University of Girona. His academic specialisation is innovation management and entrepreneurship.
He served as Vice-Rector for Campus Economics and Administration and Services Staff at the University of Girona from 1999 to 2002. At the University of Barcelona, he was director of the Department of Business, director of the Chair of Entrepreneurship, coordinator of the Business Research Group (SGR 1168) from 2014 to 2018 and director of the Barcelona Institute of Entrepreneurship. He is a member of the Teaching Innovation Group in Business Management Learning Tools, G-IDEA.
He has published books, articles and papers on innovation and entrepreneurship. He has taken part in numerous international projects (among others, the OECD, FAST/Monitor and the EU's TSER programme, Sphere and TRINNO Interreg). In Catalonia he has carried out studies for the Generalitat de Catalunya related to the Catalan ecosystem of innovation and entrepreneurship.
He is the founder and co-director (2009-2018) of the International Summer School on Creativity Management, a joint initiative between HEC Montreal and the University of Barcelona, and is also co-editor of the open access journal Journal of Evolutionary Studies in Business (JESB), promoted by the University of Barcelona.
Since 2018, he has chaired the Social and Legal Sciences Specific Committee at AQU Catalunya, the Catalan University Quality Assurance Agency.
The appointment of Jaume Valls as director of AQU Catalunya will take effect as of 1 November 2021.