The creation of the Agency for Research and Innovation goals to resolve a historic weak point of the Portuguese mannequin: the distance between scientific manufacturing and enterprise innovation.
By concentrating capabilities historically related to the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) and the National Innovation Agency (ANI) in a single entity, the State takes on a extra built-in imaginative and prescient of analysis and innovation coverage. A imaginative and prescient that seeks to hyperlink the manufacturing of scientific information to its financial and social valorization. This approximation just isn’t a technical element. It is a political, financial and cultural alternative. But a chance solely comes true if used.
For years, the public debate on innovation centered primarily on direct financing: competitions, notices, thematic applications, mobilizing agendas. Despite being important, as they information priorities, create vital mass and allow strategic areas to be enhanced, these devices are intermittent, aggressive and, typically, inadequate to maintain up with the actual tempo of companies. Innovation doesn’t occur by warning. It occurs by way of consistency.
This is the place tax advantages for analysis and improvement (R&D), resembling Sifide, achieve strategic relevance. Although much less seen in the public debate, these devices enable companies to take a position in R&D on a steady foundation, aligned with their technique and not simply the State’s calendar.
In a system that now desires to be built-in, tax advantages are the invisible thread that connects the items. In a mannequin that goals to combine elementary science, utilized analysis and enterprise innovation, they play a structuring function. They are a risk-sharing mechanism between the State and the non-public sector, encouraging funding in actions with a excessive diploma of scientific and technological uncertainty, however with potential for financial and social impression.
The very logic of AI² factors in this route. By bringing collectively the capabilities of FCT and ANI, the new company acknowledges that enterprise innovation is dependent upon a stable scientific foundation and that science advantages when it finds concrete purposes. This convergence creates significantly favorable circumstances for strengthening collaborations between companies, universities and analysis facilities – certainly one of the only components for bringing collectively elementary and utilized science.
These partnerships enable companies to entry superior information, extremely specialised expertise and scientific infrastructures that may be troublesome for them to develop internally. For analysis establishments, they symbolize an extra supply of financing, higher proximity to the financial material and a direct option to worth the information produced. It is a relationship of mutual profit, which reinforces the system as a complete.
The fiscal framework acknowledges this significance. Expenses incurred by companies on R&D tasks developed with respected entities – resembling universities, related laboratories or acknowledged analysis facilities – are 100% eligible underneath SIFIDE. This apparently technical element has a big impact: it reduces the efficient value of collaboration, reduces threat and encourages extra formidable tasks, with higher scientific and technological uncertainty.
In apply, it permits non-public funding to assist finance tutorial analysis and, at the same time, elementary science finds extra direct paths to utility. This just isn’t about changing public funding. It’s about complementing it, reinforcing it and creating bridges the place there have been beforehand silos.
AI²’s new strategic orientation, with a higher deal with impression and analysis of outcomes, will inevitably require extra rigor. This shouldn’t be scary. On the opposite. Projects developed in collaboration with universities and analysis facilities are usually extra stable and higher based. Thus, tax advantages in R&D can not be seen as an finish in themselves and will be seen as certainly one of the drivers of actual innovation.
For companies, this framework implies a change of perspective. R&D tax advantages mustn’t simply be seen as an accounting train carried out at the finish of the 12 months, however needs to be built-in into the innovation technique from the starting. What information is lacking? What expertise don’t exist internally? What partnerships could make a distinction? The solutions to those questions are as strategic as any marketing strategy.
For the scientific system, the rapprochement between FCT and ANI, now carried out in AI², will solely make sense if these connections are successfully promoted and valued. Proximity to the enterprise material doesn’t diminish the significance of elementary science. On the opposite, it provides you new means, new challenges and new methods to develop.
Innovation doesn’t come out of nowhere. It wants time, threat and belief. It wants science and it wants companies – not as parallel universes, however as components of the same system. Above all, it wants devices that know learn how to join these two worlds.
The creation of AI² opens a window of alternative to align technique, devices and practices in this route. But this chance will solely be totally utilized if tax advantages for R&D are acknowledged as an integral a part of this technique and not as a peripheral ingredient. Ignoring them could be losing the bridge at a time when, finally, there appears to be a need to cross it.