Porto de Economia wants to be more ambitious in attracting talent and investment

It's a whole day dedicated to sharing, thinking and creating an economically dynamic city. More than 50 companies, entrepreneurs, academic bodies and other economic agents are meeting this Tuesday at the Alfandega Porto Congress Centre for the first edition of the Porto de Economia forum. Once the positive results achieved together have been recognised, we are left with the assumption of an ever more ambitious attitude.

The Mayor of Porto shared three 'concerns' at the opening of the forum: the persistent 'merit phobia', the 'need to create wealth' before thinking about redistribution, and the bet on adapting to the 'Artificial Intelligence transitions' instead of 'tilting at windmills'.

Drawing attention to the 'time for decisions' that the country is currently experiencing, Rui Moreira believes that 'we need policies aimed at creating wealth and this is not done through rentier models', but through exporting companies with high added value.

'There's no need to reinvent the wheel. It's just about letting the wheel move and not trying to constantly hit the brakes', he emphasised.

Rui Moreira, giving the example of Porto, listed achievements such as the 'excellent universities and polytechnics, with the capacity to train human capital in scientific and technological areas of great potential', 'the innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem that has grown steadily in recent years', or the capacity, boosted by the actions of InvestPorto, but also by the 'city's quality of life and well-being levels', to 'attract large international technology companies'.

Attract PhDs to the business fabric to boost innovation

Even so, he believes, 'the city must continue to be ambitious'. And this will translate into 'deepening the transformation of our economy, so as to generate more qualified jobs, more business opportunities, more academia-business projects, more business innovation'.

Among the obstacles to this ambition, the mayor mentions 'administrative bureaucracy, the tax system, contextual costs, legislative instability, slow justice and the slow implementation of European funds'.

But Rui Moreira's focus at the forum was on the 'long way to go in cooperation between universities and companies', specifically on the 'negligible' number of PhDs in the business world.

The mayor argues that 'we need to better reconcile academic and business cultures', as he believes that 'with more PhDs, companies will be better positioned to invest in innovation and, from there, develop more competitive goods and services'.