Innovation and entrepreneurship, turning laboratory ideas into market ideas
Portugal has all the conditions to be a knowledge economy, to which many highly qualified women who are now arriving in the country from Eastern Europe will be able to contribute. They must therefore be welcomed and integrated into the innovation ecosystem.
Turning science into a business is firstly a question of recognising opportunities and secondly of being able to realise them.
This process is difficult and time-consuming and requires a multidimensional support infrastructure in various areas, a true innovation ecosystem that ensures the identification of opportunities, allows the development of the business and its financing, which basically accompanies the researcher from the laboratory to the market, covering the entire life cycle of a product, from the initial idea to its marketing and commercialisation.
There are many barriers to overcome along the way. I'd like to highlight a few:
- Cultural differences between academic and business circles: most of the time it's about communicating, understanding, respecting and interacting with people from other fields and this requires commitment and effort on both sides. Scientists, entrepreneurs and funders need to work more closely together.
- Internalising risk: recognising that risk is part of the "game" and recognising the difference between high risk and unnecessary risk. This attitude towards risk is a significant difference between Europe and the USA, where in North American culture there is a greater appetite for risk and it is considered natural and desirable to fail along the path of learning.
- Understanding who the customer is and what they might want: for a scientist who has been trained to do basic research, this is perhaps one of the biggest challenges. A great scientific or technical innovation is one thing. It's quite another to know how that technology can be used, to understand the market and how the business will be financed.
In order to overcome these difficulties, it is increasingly recognised that the various stakeholders needed to carry out and develop this process of knowledge and technology transfer must work together and, ideally, in close geographical proximity to each other.
For innovation to work, all the ingredients must come together: people, higher education institutions, research institutes/centres, companies and funding. This has been Europe's problem, because the ecosystem was never complete, there were always pieces missing from the puzzle.
In recent years, Europe, and Portugal in particular, have put a great deal of effort into both funding mechanisms and producing policies to overcome this situation.
There has been a great deal of development of science and technology parks, where higher education institutions, research institutions, companies, incubators and business accelerators come together in the same geographical area, in other words, where all the stakeholders of the innovation ecosystem meet. In the Portuguese case, the implementation and development of collaborative laboratories adds another dimension to this ecosystem.
The transfer of technology and knowledge is therefore a fundamental growth strategy for innovation and for the sustainable growth of the economic fabric.
Portugal has all the conditions to effectively be a knowledge economy and we cannot fail to mention, given the current situation in Eastern Europe, the potential contribution of the people who are now arriving in our country: many women, highly qualified, who should be welcomed and integrated into the innovation ecosystem, thus contributing to the sustainable economic growth of our country.
Read article in portuguese here.
by Marise Almeida