Applications until 31 August for those who want to help to build Porto's innovation and technology ecosystem

Until 31 August, the Call for Activities 2022 is accepting applications submitted by entities and collective organisations, national or foreign, to promote activities that stimulate Porto's innovation ecosystem.

The Call for Activities has been held since 2017 and until the current edition has had more than 10 thousand participants in 36 activities supported by the initiative.

Based on the number of proposals received every year that are not selected, despite their quality and relevance, in this new edition it was decided to increase the budget to a total of 100 thousand euros, with each activity selected receiving up to 10 thousand euros in support.

In terms of fields of action, the candidate activities for the 2022 edition should relate to:

• studies, mapping and assessments of the Innovation and Technology ecosystem;
• knowledge sharing, empowerment, and professional training, as well as citizen training for new technologies and Digital Transition;
• promotion and revitalisation of technological communities and promotion of science and knowledge;
• valorisation of Innovation and Technology among technology-based companies, namely by supporting idealization and experimentation, as well as the development of innovative solutions and services.

The jury that will assess the relevance and appropriateness of the applications submitted in 2022 is comprised of Rafael Pedroso (Instituto Politécnico do Porto), Lurdes Gramaxo (Associação Portuguesa de Business Angels), Maria Oliveira (UPTEC), Paulo Calçada (Porto Digital), Rui Monteiro (Porto City Hall), Filipe Castro (Porto Business School) and André Fernandes (U. Porto Inovação).

The initiative, promoted by the Municipality of Porto, is part of the strategy for innovation and digital transition and is coordinated by Porto Digital through the platform for innovation Porto Innovation Hub. This new edition counts on the support of UPTEC – Parque da Ciência e da Tecnologia da Universidade do Porto.

Successful history

Those who can best talk about the boost given by Call for Activities are those that, in the past, have benefited from the support and "rolled up their sleeves" to positively transform the city. This is the case of the project Portuguese Women in Tech (PWIT) whose applications - always submitted with new activities, in all the previous editions of the initiative, from 2017 to 2021 - were selected by the different juries. Considering "essential" the existence of the Call for Activities for local technology communities, Liliana Castro, from the PWIT community, has no doubts: "Without this support, we wouldn't be able to launch the new initiatives, since we wouldn't have been able to manage the costs."

Rui Santos Couto, of the Founders Founders community, which has already seen three of its activities selected within the scope of the programme, highlights the boost it has triggered for "the creation of projects with a great impact on the ecosystem that, otherwise, would probably never have happened."

With one activity selected on the 2021 edition – the Beyond the Lab programme, an entrepreneurship bootcamp directed to scientists with business ideas associated with investigation centres – the Porto start-up Chaperone took advantage of this support to start the project it had been nurturing for a long time but had been putting off because it required a bank loan. For Pedro Resende, co-founder of Chaperone, the Call for Activities “is a simple and very effective way to nurture the ecosystem, for example, by giving selected entities an opportunity to promote themselves, by generating learning opportunities that are useful for all members of the community and by leveraging partnerships between different stakeholders in the ecosystem."