Every year, as we near the holidays, we seek the time to reach out in our closer communities to celebrate the precious opportunities of doing special things together. In multiple events these weeks, this is also happening at INESC TEC, in our case to celebrate coming together in science, technology, and innovation, for the benefit of our broader communities.
The world in general, our country and our region in particular, continue to require much progress in many aspects of society, economy, and environment. Science, technology, and innovation also continue to have a major role to play in this endeavour. The UN’s sustainable development goals, increasingly important as guides for our work, are a constant and vivid reminder of how much better we need to do – and can do!
We should proudly celebrate the fact that we have risen to this challenge again, in the year that is now ending. Our activity has grown very strongly, a growth mostly driven by European projects, enhancing our contribution and the embedment of Portugal in international science and innovation dynamics. Our R&D team, our key capability in the important role we play, has grown in line with our activity, and we have reversed a multi-annual decrease in grant holders since the government’s changes to the grant holder statutes, to see this part of our team also grow, again in line with our activity. At the same time, we have continued to strengthen our organisation, namely launching new work in foundational areas such as ethics, and diversity and inclusion.
In science, the priority to excellence and impact is leading to another strong year in terms of the proportion of publications in high visibility outlets, and a researcher from our core team, Bruno Loff, received an ERC grant, the most prestigious funding for science in the EU. 2022 will be our strongest year ever in collaborations with industry, considering the diverse categories of activities in which we work side by side with companies, pushing the technological state of the art, as for instance did our colleagues from CRAS who set a new world record for depth in the exploration of flooded caves, with their new UX-1Neo robotics platform, working together with our spinoff UGR.
We have also already set the foundations for an even more ambitious following year. Our growth for 2023 is estimated at 30%, mostly driven by the Recovery and Resilience Plan (PRR) Innovation Agendas, but also by European projects, and our R&D contract team is planned to grow more than 40%.
Within PRR, we have been challenged in our mission of service to deliver on the strategic aim of these Agendas – creating strong technology innovation-based areas in our economy, a tremendous responsibility! This means that it is our duty to use this funding to make our institution stronger and to work with others to create powerful partnerships that will carry on into the future as the basis for sustainable continuing innovation. This means that for INESC TEC, PRR must further empower all our other commitments, building on the synergies between its opportunities and our permanent endeavours. We must leverage these activities, these partnerships, these developments, to build a stronger presence in Europe, to establish a renewed and appealing offer of R&D services and technology transfer capabilities. We must use this unique opportunity for a very concentrated and broad contribution of science to the Portuguese society to make a stronger public case for the importance of science and make sure that it is appropriately cherished and nourished for the future by our country.
To celebrate our 37th anniversary, earlier this year, we built together a beautiful symbol of who we are, what we do, and why we do it – the giant puzzle with the message “Piecing science, technology, and society” that is on display in the lobby of our headquarters. It elegantly reflects the essence of what we have achieved in 2022, what we are striving to achieve in 2023, and what we celebrate these days as INESC TEC community.
As a symbol, at this time of the year, it is bound to conjure the other even more important puzzles in our lives, those in which we are piecing together the happiness and love that we share with your families and friends. In the coming days, let’s put all our focus on them!
For all, happy holidays, happy 2023, let’s continue our celebrations!
José Manuel Mendonça (Chairman of the Board)
João Claro (Vice-Chairman and CEO)
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