I recently moderated a panel discussion on Portugal’s innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem, with a particular focus on the relationship between universities as spaces for knowledge creation and the business world. The conversation was rich, the participants brought diverse perspectives, and the level of energy in the room was genuinely encouraging. Yet it also became evident that something those working in this space have sensed for quite some time remains true: we have the ingredients, but the transformation process is still not functioning consistently.
Portugal produces high-quality research. Our universities educate internationally recognized talent. The country now has a growing number of startups and scale-ups demonstrating that it is possible to build competitive companies from Portugal. And yet, the gap between the knowledge generated in laboratories and its economic application remains larger than it should be.
My view is that this is a matter of ecosystem design rather than the capabilities of its actors, and there are three factors that I believe are decisive in closing this gap.
The first, and most structural, is the genuine strengthening of Technology Transfer Offices, internationally known as TTOs (Technology Transfer Offices, sometimes referred to as Knowledge Transfer Offices). In Portugal, these offices formally exist in many universities, but their operational capacity, resources, and institutional standing vary enormously, and they rarely achieve the critical mass required to be truly effective.
Technology transfer requires people with a very specific profile: individuals capable of reading a scientific paper, understanding its commercial potential, structuring conversations with business leaders, negotiating licensing agreements, and supporting the creation of spin-offs. It is a role that mediates between two worlds with very different languages, incentives, and time horizons, and one that is rarely resolved through goodwill alone or through underfunded structures.
Over the past two years, I have had the opportunity to visit universities in the United Kingdom and Ireland, and to engage with professionals in this field at the recent R&D Management Conference held in Manchester. What emerged most clearly from these conversations was, paradoxically, encouraging: even in ecosystems where technology transfer has been an established practice for decades, there continues to be active investment in improving collaboration models among stakeholders. Dedicated funding exists to strengthen these capabilities, projects are underway to bring researchers, companies, and investors even closer together, and there is a clear recognition that the work is never finished. These are not markets resting on an established advantage. They are markets continuously reinvesting in that advantage. For Portugal, which is still building this architecture, the message is twofold: the journey is long, but it is well signposted by those who have already traveled it.
The model of the MIT Technology Licensing Office is frequently cited as a benchmark, and for good reason. The TLO’s stated mission is to move innovations and discoveries from the laboratory to the marketplace for the public benefit and in close partnership with inventors throughout the MIT community (MIT TLO, 2025). More than simply managing patents, what distinguishes it is its strategic ambition to build a continuous bridge between research and economic impact. In Portugal, we need TTOs with that same level of ambition and the institutional resources necessary to make it a reality.
The second factor is more difficult to address through policy alone, but it is equally decisive: the institutional culture of Portuguese universities still does not adequately reward engagement with the economic sector.
Academic careers are largely evaluated based on the number of publications in indexed scientific journals. Patents, spin-offs, corporate partnerships, and industry co-creation projects rarely carry the same weight in promotion processes. The outcome is predictable: a rational researcher chooses the path that the institution values. And to this day, that path is still primarily publication rather than application.
Recent research on university-industry collaboration in Portugal and Spain has clearly identified this issue: the absence of an entrepreneurial culture remains one of the main obstacles preventing universities from becoming active agents of economic development (Audretsch, cited in Natário and Oliveira, 2025). The goal is not to replace fundamental research with immediate pragmatism. Fundamental research has intrinsic value and serves as the foundation for everything else. What is at stake is creating conditions in which researchers who wish to move toward practical application find real incentives to do so, rather than mere institutional goodwill without tangible consequences for career advancement.
The third factor is the one that appears least frequently in discussions about innovation, perhaps because it presents the greatest challenge: initiative from the business community. An innovation ecosystem only functions when there is active demand from companies. And in Portugal, that demand remains more limited than it should be.
There is a group of Portuguese companies, particularly larger organizations and those exposed to international competition, that have already understood that proximity to university research constitutes a competitive advantage. However, they remain the exception. Most companies, especially SMEs, maintain only an occasional relationship with the scientific system: they turn to universities when faced with a specific and immediate problem, but rarely invest in building long-term partnerships.
Germany’s Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft provides a relevant example. Its primary mission is to conduct applied contract research for industry, particularly SMEs, translating basic research into commercial products and industrial processes (National Academies, 2024). The effectiveness of this model rests precisely on industry commitment: active partners bringing real-world challenges that need solving and a willingness to co-finance the search for solutions. Without this level of business engagement, even the best TTOs and universities will continue speaking to an audience that is not in the room.
This requires a shift in mindset within the Portuguese business community: moving away from viewing universities merely as providers of skilled labor and beginning to see them as strategic partners in creating competitive advantage. It also requires public policies, whether national or municipal, that encourage such engagement, particularly through support structures that facilitate access to funding and make it easier for companies to participate in collaborative R&D projects, bringing researchers and managers together in a structured and sustained way. In the United Kingdom and Ireland, this role is assumed explicitly. Public mechanisms exist to facilitate companies’ access to funding, and TTOs themselves benefit from institutional support to develop their operating models. The experience of these countries demonstrates that the market alone does not naturally generate this level of collaboration and that governments have an active role to play in creating the conditions that make it possible.
Portugal is currently experiencing a genuine moment of opportunity. The presence of technology centers established by global companies, the consolidation of startups with international ambitions, and the growth of R&D investment over recent decades have created a foundation that did not exist twenty years ago. The talent is here. The research is being conducted. The next step is to build the institutional architecture capable of transforming that potential into lasting economic value.
Sílvia Almeida, Professor at Católica-Lisbon SBE