University of Maribor
The University of Maribor (UM) is Slovenia’s second largest and oldest university, with 17 faculties, 2,000 employees, and 14,000 students. UM is a leading development institution linking with the economy to foster sustainable regional development. It aims for excellence, interdisciplinarity, and international cooperation, encouraging partnerships with companies and institutions to enrich education, research, and artistic activities. UM is innovating in new study methods and integrating with its environment across various scientific disciplines including engineering, biotechnology, humanities, medicine, social sciences, and natural sciences.
Ranked among the top 4% of universities worldwide, UM has received numerous accolades such as the HR Excellence in Research award, the Global Student Satisfaction Award, and the Athlete Friendly Education Certificate. Notable achievements include developing TRISAT, Slovenia’s first nanosatellite, contributing to the national supercomputing centre HPC RIVR, and advancing air transport with electric and hydrogen-powered aircraft projects. UM has also been recognized at the Formula Student competition and received the Reimagine Education award for the Demola project, which connects companies with innovative student teams.
UM actively engages in international projects under major EU programs like Horizon 2020, Interreg, and Erasmus+. In 2017, it participated in 11 Horizon 2020 projects, 43 other international research projects, and 80 international development projects. UM is a member of various international associations, including the Danube Rectors Conference, the European University Association, and the International Association of Universities. It is the first Slovene university awarded the “HR Excellence in Research” certification.
Borut Milfelner
Team
Tina Šegota is an Associate Professor in Tourism and holds the position of Vice Dean for Science and Research at the Faculty of Tourism University of Maribor. She has two doctorates in marketing communications and economics and business (major: tourism) from the University of Ljubljana. She is a multi-award-winning academic with research and teaching experience in marketing and tourism worldwide. In tourism academia, Tina became recognised as a researcher focused on residents’ quality of life, children, and destination marketing. She has received many international academic awards, including the Emerald Literati and Best Paper Awards. Tina was invited as an international keynote speaker and some of her engagements include speaking at the OECD Summer Academy and UNESCO UNITWIN Conference and engaging at scientific and professional conferences. She sits on the editorial boards of three tourism journals and reviews for top tourism and marketing journals. In addition, she is a Theme Editor of Quality of Life for the International Journal of Tourism Cities. Tina is leading several projects, among which is a national research project funded by the Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency on children’s attitudes towards tourism.
She will be a team leader for the University of Maribor in the CORCUs project. She will also contribute to all work packages where the UM is included, specifically focusing on WP4 and WP5, which evolve around setting and managing eight cross-border living labs.
Maja Turnšek is an Associate Professor in Tourism at the Faculty of Tourism University of Maribor. Her current research focuses on the interconnections between climate change, working conditions and creative industries in tourism. After two mandates as the Vice Dean and one as the Head of the Master’s Programme Tourism Destinations and Experiences, she is now focused on research projects, teaching and publishing. Maja is active in many different project, developing them and leading them on the national and international level. She was also the national lead of the Interreg Mediterranean project BEST MED (Nov 2020- Sept 2022), focusing on the sustainable management of Cultural Routes of the Council of Europe. As a result of this project, she is highly active in the system of Cultural Routes of the Council of Europe, leading the national efforts towards the Association of Cultural Routes of Council of Europe in Slovenia, organising meetings with the cultural routes members and supporting the bottom up-process of coordination and growth of the routes in Slovenia. This allowed the Faculty of Tourism to join the Academic Network of Cultural Routes Studies, where Maja is a signatory researcher. She is involved in a large-scale national research project, Heritage for Inclusive Sustainable Transformation – HEI-TRANSFORM (J7-4641), which connects ten research organisations in Slovenia. The project focuses on the field of immobile cultural heritage and develops approaches for the sustainable reuse of abandoned and degraded objects and areas. The project includes establishing four social labs for participatory decision-making regarding the sustainable reuse of abandoned immobile cultural heritage.
In the project, she will work in all work packages that UM is part of, especially in the WP2, WP4 and WP5, where her expertise in cultural tourism, stakeholder engagement and sustainable tourism will be very valuable.
Borut Milfelner is a full marketing and assistant tourism professor at the University of Maribor, Faculty of Economics and Business. His expertise encompasses marketing research, internal marketing, consumer behaviour, and tourism marketing. Within marketing, his primary focus revolves around structural equation modelling, encompassing both linear and non-linear CB-SEM and PLS-SEM methodologies, with a particular emphasis on invariance testing in cross-cultural research. He participated in several research projects for the Ministry of education, science, and sport, Slovenian Research Agency, Ministry of Economic Development, and Technology, Slovenian Tourist Board, and in European Union founded projects. As a member of numerous tourism research teams, he has contributed to projects ranging from developing methodologies for continuous monitoring of tourist satisfaction to establishing innovative HRM models for the Slovenian tourism sector. His involvement also extends to designing comprehensive methodologies for Hotel CRM, developing strategies for Slovenian gastronomy, and strategies aimed at fostering cultural tourism in Slovenia.
He will be participating in WP4 in establishing a living lab core development team in collaboration with local stakeholders and collect secondary and primary data in each of the eight living lab crossborder areas and in WP8 in communication and dissemination activities.
Anja Mlakar is a Teaching Assistant in Tourism at the Faculty of Tourism University of Maribor and a Research Associate at the Institute IRRIS. Her initial research was in the field of folklore studies. Her research endeavours included an interdisciplinary approach combining anthropological, archaeological, and historiographical approaches. After completing an apprenticeship at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary History in Ljubljana and completing a National Certification for the title of Museum Curator, she worked as a librarian at the National and University Library of Slovenia. She also received several research scholarships abroad. Following her research break and maternity leave, she has been employed at the Faculty of Tourism since 2021, where she has been working as a teaching assistant for courses relating to cultural heritage and as a researcher on several national and international projects. Her current research includes vernacular religion and its meanings, forms, and transformations in the past and present. She is also currently doing research in museum studies and archaeological tourism, as well as in luxury tourism and Cultural Routes of the Council of Europe. She regularly works as a reviewer for several academic journals and has published a scholarly monograph and several academic articles in peer-reviewed journals.
She will work in all work packages that UM is part of, especially in the WP2 and WP5, where her expertise in cultural tourism and background in qualitative research methods will be very valuable.
Barbara Bradač Hojnik is a full professor of entrepreneurship at the Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Maribor. She is a head of the Institute for entrepreneurship and small business management at the faculty. She is a leader of the Slovenian Entrepreneurship Observatory research, and a member of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor Slovenia team and the research programme Entrepreneurship for Innovative Society. She is an expert for the EU SME Performance Review project for Slovenia and other projects for EC. Her main research interests are startup and sustainable entrepreneurship, corporate and digital entrepreneurship. She is the (co)author of several scientific articles, scientific monographs, as well as contributions to international scientific conferences.
She will participate in WP5 on engaging local stakeholders from the Living Labs in a process of co-creation to develop new sustainable and inclusive CCT business models.
Maja Rožman, PhD is an assistant professor in quantitative economic analyses at the University of Maribor, Faculty of Economics and Business, Department of Quantitative Economic Analyses. She is head of the Department of Quantitative Economic Analysis at UM FEB and a member of the Institute for Operational Research, which operates within the research-educational center of the Faculty of Economics and Business of the University of Maribor. She is interested in quantitative methods in economics and business sciences. Her research work at a foreign university was recently done at the University of Zadar, Department of Economics. As a researcher and member of the Institute for Operational Research, she is involved in several international and market research projects.
Within the CROCUS project, she will participate in WP4 in establishing a living lab core development team in collaboration with local stakeholders and collect secondary and primary data in each of the eight living lab cross-border areas.
Slovenia