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A unique professional development program took place for senior student affairs officers at The University of Salamanca (Spain) in June 2005. Participants had first-hand experiences with studying abroad and had opportunities to exchange ideas and perspectives with professionals from a variety of institutions from within and outside of the United States. This article will describe the purpose of the Institute, the workshops presented, and the learning outcomes attained. By examining the answers to those questions, a variety of themes emerged clarifying the participants' learning outcomes and potential applications of how to use those new perspectives.

• The results reveal a common pattern of behaviour in the north-eastern regions of both Spain and Italy. • The stringency of environmental policies positively affects innovation efficiency. • Efficiency and environmental health significantly affect the GDP per capita of the Spanish and Italian territories. • Innovation cannot be analysed exclusively from a technology- and market-oriented perspective Innovation and environmental sustainability are key elements in countries' development and essential to ensure their continuing competitiveness in an increasingly globalised market. Similarly, at the regional level, these elements mark the difference between higher/lower growth; as such, the evaluation of innovation processes is very useful to orient innovation policies towards those regions that need additional strategies to develop potential improvements. This study proposes the use, in the first stage, of DEA-Bootstrap and the Malmquist Index to analyse the innovation efficiency level in Spanish and Italian regions during the period 2004-2012. In the second stage, multilevel regression is used to analyse the relationship between efficiency, environmental sustainability and economic development. The results show great differences between the territories of the two countries analysed, confirming the need to establish differentiated policies that encourage the adoption of innovation practices in regions whose efficiency scores have shown a lack of rigour in the use of their resources, i.e. southern Italian and Spanish regions. Furthermore, we demonstrated that the stringency of environmental policies positively affects innovation efficiency, with a positive relationship identified among development, innovation, and environmental sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]