“likeminds – german-turkish junior expert initiative”, launched by Robert Bosch Stiftung, European Academy of Berlin (EAB) and Istanbul Policy Center (IPC) at Sabanci University, is a binational exchange program in Germany and Turkey. The program aims to strengthen ties between young German and Turkish top performers, also to intensify practical and topic-oriented exchange of ideas, experience, and understanding. In addition, it aims to contribute towards creating a professional and personal network, bringing together young experts, the deciders of the future.
In practical terms, the program is designed to address German and Turkish future experts, ‘high fliers’, young or junior experts, opinion formers, and disseminators from all sectors of society. Participants will enter into current social and political debates and confront cutting-edge issues. “likeminds” consists of three components: a preparatory workshop, held simultaneously in Turkey and Germany, followed by two tours d’horizon in both countries.
At the workshop, participants choose different aspects of the year’s focus topic to be elaborated during the program year. At the tours d’horizon, they get the opportunity to discuss their chosen issues with German and Turkish leading experts from politics, economy, academia, and media.
focus topic for 2013
► Trading potentials: Shaping economic life and connecting cultures
The topic for this year will take as its central focus commercial and business relations and foreign trade between Gemany and Turkey. Trade increases prosperity, establishes contacts between people and cultures and is the life blood of every national economy in the world based on division of labour.
This year's programme will explore fully the wide and diverse exchange of commodities, goods, services and resources which is in place between Germany and Turkey and locate it in a larger - european and global - context.
It will in addition address the commercial relations which have evolved between the two countries; it will explore in depth how economic life and foreign trade are structured and directed in each of the respective countries, who the protagonists are and what the driving forces of the trade are.
As free trade also encourages inter-cultural contacts, knowledge and life-style transfer of all kinds and is dependent on forces in civil society, the programme will also be focused on challenges and opportunities which trading and transfer in general hold for the economy and society.
In Istanbul and Kayseri, one of the most important industrial and commercial centres in Turkey, as well as in Berlin and Hamburg, participants will gain information in dialogue with actors in foreign trade about trade and business fields as well as foreign trade policy goals and instruments.
Participants will visit trading locations, look behind the scenes and corporate cultures.
Following also the traces of historical, architectural and cultural monuments of exchange and trade, we will highlight lines of continuity leading to present conditions for (global) trading.
The topic is directed towards not only applicants from the fields of business, enterprises and (international) trade but in particular also to interested persons from politics, the media, civil society, academia and to creative artists.
program's core components
application form here