By Bruna Pereira – July 8, 2016
The editorial initiative of NOS and the Impresa group, built in partnership with Expresso and SIC Notícias, was presented last June 29th at the Ajuda National Palace, in Lisbon, and seeks to enhance the theme of innovation as a priority for the companies and the whole country. Based on six structural and fundamental issues for companies (creating value, initiatives and products, digitalization, managing talent, networking and consumer focus), the Círculo da Inovação initiative selected the first 100 young talents, who represent the new generation of Portuguese entrepreneurs and innovators and will make a difference within their organizations.
Over the coming months, these 100 innovators coming from companies and institutions as diverse as Microsoft, Boost Tourism, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Jerónimo Martins, Raize, CTT, Fruut or NutriVentures, will help rise to multidisciplinary discussions, stimulating the creation of new answers and innovative solutions that will help launch national talent across borders. In order to take these messages of change to all corners of Portugal, new television programs and digital and print reports will be created – "The role of NOS and Impresa is that your testimony can reach everybody, being a catalyst for change. The country needs new things", reinforced the President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, while pointing out the fact that Portugal is "an aged and traditional country”, but at the same time "a country where new startups appear every day" to help change the world.
The main challenges of the Círculo da Inovação project are creating value (creating real assets within companies); initiatives and products (discovering the secrets to create true capital gains in companies); digitalization (seeing the change in a world made increasingly of bits and bytes); managing talent (knowing how to use human resources in the best way to generate innovation); networking (linking entrepreneurship and the economy); and customer focus (to know how the companies ensure that "the customer is always right"). In this regard, the initiative ended with Sarah Harmon, Head of Spain and Portugal LinkedIn Talent Solutions. The expert in social networks underlined that although the digital age is a reality, "innovation does not come from machines”, it results from people, and connecting talented individuals with companies who need them to get to continue the innovation process is an imperative. This is where digital platforms like LinkedIn come in – a kind of mega "business cards” network that allows human beings to connect with each other to make wonderful things happen.
Learn more about this initiative in www.circulodainovacao.pt.