The Algarve will provide the ideas, knowledge and innovative technology. Altice will be the facilitator, which can either finance project development or place products on the global market. Olhão will be the place where the “exchange” will take place, when the future Altice Lab do Algarve is installed.
Nine months ago, the Chamber of Olhão challenged the multinational telecommunications company to choose this city to install one of the points of its decentralized network for technological development. Altice, which recently acquired PT-Portugal Telecom, which had had an innovation laboratory at the University of Aveiro for decades, accepted and will have a technology hub with a business incubator in the Algarve, which will join those recently created in Viseu and Funchal.
For now, and before there is a physical component of this technological pole, a Strategic Council will be created, which, in addition to the company, will bring together public and private entities in the region, including the University of Algarve, "a fundamental partner", according to the president of the Chamber of Olhão António Pina.
When the partnership between the municipality and the multinational was agreed, it was established that it would be up to Olhão to “call more partners”, which has already happened.
Once this body has been created, something that is expected to happen "by the end of October", entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs will be challenged to come up with ideas and projects for technological products that may be used by Altice or that the economic group can help sell in the market National and international.
It was the establishment of a calendar for this collaboration that brought, on Wednesday, Olhão, representatives of the international group Alcino Lavrador, general director of Altice Labs, and André Figueiredo, coordinator of this decentralization project.
The session was already attended by representatives of many of the entities that, in the near future, will help to develop this point of technological development and knowledge transfer, whose main objective is to allow the birth of highly specialized companies and attract «brains to fix in the region'.
«Since Altice is a company with a presence in many countries, producing, creating and developing new ideas here gains a global dimension. And the Algarve, namely Olhão, want to assert itself as a place where brains linked to technologies want to work and settle down. Have you ever seen the dream that is not, for an Englishman, a Frenchman or a German, to come to develop projects linked to new technologies for the place where they spend their holidays? That is the challenge», considered António Pina.
The challenge is open to creators from all over the world, but it is expected that it will mainly have a multiplier effect on the Algarve's business fabric linked to the development of technology. The only mark that exists for the products to be developed is that they will have to be innovative and “usable” (or marketable) by Altice, a group that is directly present not only in Portugal, but also in countries like the Netherlands (where it is from origin), France, the United States and Israel, among others, and which, in addition, has business in many other countries around the world.
“We won't be the ones to dictate which products will be developed. This is something that has to make sense to both parties. What we want is to create a community of developers who can enrich what we do. It could be totally new things or even something that already exists that we think is worth promoting. We can be a facilitator at the various stages: in development, research and in the market», illustrated Alcino Lavrador.
“Our goal is to capture ideas for innovation, products and technologies, as we have already seen with the partners we currently have. With this step [decentralization], we are trying to find other mechanisms that will help us to innovate even more. The local dynamics of entrepreneurship and support for innovation are essential to create a network, which the bigger it is, the more new ideas it generates», summarized the general director of Altice Labs. On the other hand, Altice will be able to "guarantee the financing, co-develop the products or simply sponsor the projects".
And Altice Labs' experience in taking ideas to turn them into products is great, since its central hub in Portugal, located in Aveiro, has existed for decades and allowed PT to become an international reference company, in which technological development concerns. "Every day, more than 250 million people communicate through technology designed and developed by Altice in Portugal [by PT], with Portuguese engineering and production," said Alcino Lavrador.
With the creation of this partnership and the opening of a door to the world, it is expected that new businesses can emerge in the region, start ups that will be able to install themselves in the incubator of technology-based companies that the Chamber of Olhão is going to create.
At the outset, there are two possibilities, a more immediate one, «the renting of a space with 200 square meters», already identified, and another, in the medium term, the construction from scratch «of a building of 400 square meters». "It will depend on what proves necessary," he said. The goal is to have this valence up and running "in the first quarter of 2018".
As soon as it is formally constituted, the Strategic Council will “evaluate proposals from young companies or from other less young companies that already exist, so that they can settle here”.
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