RRF Mobilizing Agendas surpass the most optimistic expectations

"Our most optimistic expectations were surpassed by the excellence of our work", said the Portuguese Prime Minister António Costa at the closing session to present the 64 projects picked for the Mobilizing Agendas for Corporate Innovation, which was held over two days in Matosinhos, Portugal.

The Prime Minister underlined that this programme, integrated in the Recovery and Resilience Facility, "is a unique opportunity to transform our country’s economic profile".

António Costa congratulated "all the consortia for the work presented, which is a factor of confidence in our country’s future for the demonstration of excellence of our corporate fabric and our science and technology system".

The Next Generation EU programme, launched so the European Union may come out from the pandemic crisis stronger and more resilient, in which the RRF is included, "is a unique opportunity in which we must invest to do what we don’t do with standard EU funding".

Harnessing human capital

The Government felt that this "was an opportunity to mobilize the best of our corporate fabric and our science and technology system to, together, work towards launching new products and services of greater added value in the market".

"This is the only path to raise our country’s prosperity, to have competitive companies on a global scale that create better jobs, with fair wages", he said.

The Prime Minister said that the only way "to harness this human capital is by continuing to invest in training, using their knowledge and transforming it into economic value".

Consortia

Noting that "for years, we heard of the distancing between companies and the science and technology sector", he claimed that "for this reason, our goal was to set up consortia", and the call "launched on 1 July and which ran until 30 September, had 3251 entities, of which 2015 companies, coming together into consortia and presenting 146 proposals".

António Costa said that the proposals presented for the allocation of funds showed that "we have the capacity to scale up through the consortium, the capacity to operate in a network".

The Mobilizing Agendas programme "complements other programmes in the Recovery and Resilience Facility, in digitalization, climate transition, the Portugal 20130 programmes and others that are centrally managed by the European Commission", he said, adding that "many of these consortia have the conditions to compete with the best on a European level, achieving more funds for Portugal through the programmes that are run directly by the European Commission". 

The Prime Minister concluded by saying that "we mustn’t be exceptional only in exceptional times, we must be exceptional always, because we have the conditions to be so".