Good practice:

Mobilising R&TD Programmes - Support System for Scientific & Technological Research

Mobilising R&TD Programmes (MP) are strategic R&TD projects that aim at the creation of new products, processes and services with a high knowledge content and degree of technological innovation, which contribute towards their value chain and constitute themselves as focal drivers of capabilities and specific scientific and technological competencies, leading to significant impacts at multisectorial level, namely allowing an effective technology exploitation and appropriation by the promoters. Some Mobilising R&TD Programmes address Europe's societal challenges.

By their transversality and comprehensiveness of the competences involved, these projects are often broken down into multiple partial projects (integrated in the attainment of a global objective). The partial units must gather several complementary skills and should be structured around concrete objectives.

This measure funds co-promotion projects: cross-cutting, strategic R&D projects aimed at creating new products, processes or services with a strong technology and innovation component, which can have significant impacts at a multisectoral level, in particular by enabling the endogenization and exploitation of the developed technologies. This measure encourages cooperation between the different partners and it allows the co-creation of the best solutions.

MP are funded by Support System for Scientific&Technological Research, which is implemented through:

- Competitiveness and Internationalization OP: supporting multiregional projects and large projects (>3M€);
- Regional OP: supporting regional projects.

85M€ of ERDF were already allocated.

To date, under Mobilising R&TD Programmes, one call for proposals has been published, Call n.º 10/SI/2016, for all the Regions of Mainland Portugal.

Currently, 12 projects are being implemented. These projects represent an overall investment of 97 M€ and incentives of 63 M€.

In programming period 2007-2013, 13 projects were funded under Mobilising R&TD Programmes. These projects have totaled an overall investment of 79 M€, an overall incentive of 52 M€ and involved 292 partners.

This good practice represents an integrated policy measure to support cluster consolidation and strengthen cross-cluster cooperation.

The Mobilising R&TD Programmes funded are strategic R&TD projects that constitute themselves as focal drivers of capabilities and specific scientific and technological competencies, leading to significant impacts at multisectorial level, namely allowing an effective technology exploitation and appropriation by the promoters.

Within the scope of the implemented projects, a comprehensive set of activities addressing to the promotion of R&D+I, cooperation and internationalization were implemented.

The beneficiaries were at a first level the projects’ partners (292 involved partners from Portuguese industry, Portuguese Science and Technology System and other stakeholders). Beyond these partners, the scope of reaching projects’ activities is considerably wide (e.g. integration in other networks and platforms).