On a hilltop high above the city center on the campus of the University of Coimbra stands an imposing statue of King Dinis, the university’s founder. He is tufted with tatters of black fabric, remnants of a tradition in which friends rip a graduate’s academic robe to celebrate completion of his studies. Like much at Coimbra, which was founded in 1290 and is one of Europe’s oldest universities, the practice dates back centuries.
But now the Portuguese government hopes Coimbra and the country’s other higher-education institutions can help the nation face the future, by leveraging university know-how to turn the country into a center for innovation. “A small country like Portugal can only survive,” says Manuel Heitor, the secretary of state for science, technology, and higher education, “by becoming innovative and international—a true knowledge economy.”
To that end, Portuguese spending on scientific research and development has increased exponentially in recent years, growing from 0.4 percent of gross domestic product in the late 1980s, to 0.81 percent in 2005 and 1.55 percent just three years later.
Central to Portugal’s aggressive innovation agenda are ambitious overseas partnerships with four highly entrepreneurial American institutions—Carnegie Mellon University, Harvard Medical School, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Texas at Austin—to expand academic and research programs and exchange faculty. The strategy is to better link Portuguese universities to international scientific networks, to industry and its real-world problems, and, not insignificantly, to one another.
Such aspirational collaborations, says Mr. Heitor, one of the plan’s architects, act as a “solid glue” to form international and domestic networks around key areas like advanced computing, bioengineering, energy, medical education, and transportation. The government is spending more than 50 million euros, or almost $64-million, a year on this and other international relationships. And business-sector partners contributed more than 1.6-million euros in 2009 to just one of the programs, between Portugal and Carnegie Mellon.
Even as the economic crisis has forced the country to adopt tough austerity measures, science and research have been spared from budget cuts.
Still, given current economic headwinds, cost is a critical challenge to sustaining the project, begun in 2006 with the option for renewal at the end of five years. The effort must also overcome a historic gulf in Portugal between academe and industry, an insular higher-education system, and a business climate with little tolerance for risk.
João Sentieiro, president of the Foundation for Science and Technology, akin to the American National Science Foundation, says Portugal can ill afford not to take the risk. “Many of us in Portugal are big believers that scientific research is the most important driving force in the modernizing of the economy,” he says. “Our goal has to be to produce good science and to give economic value to good science.”
Playing Catch-Up
Portugal is not alone in attempting to use education to fuel economic growth, of course. A similar strategy has been embraced by Asian countries struggling for a niche in an ever-more-competitive global economy. And across Europe, efforts are under way to loose academic expertise from the ivory tower and apply it to the economy (see article on Page A18).
Portugal’s challenges in this area have been particularly great. While Coimbra is one of the oldest universities in continuous operation, education was given little priority during four decades of authoritarian rule by António de Oliveira Salazar and his successors, with relatively few Portuguese earning university degrees. Many, in fact, completed only primary school.
Since the early 1970s, though, Portugal has worked to play catch-up, expanding educational opportunities at home and sending top students abroad to earn graduate degrees. Still, even today, Portugal lags behind other industrial nations in the share of young adults who hold at least an associate degree. .
“People forget that 30, 40 years ago, Portugal had huge levels of illiteracy,” says Manuel Beja, head of corporate development for Novabase, a leading Portuguese information-technology company. “It was the dark ages.”
As a consequence, the Portuguese economy remained anchored in minimally skilled, poorly paying industries, like agriculture, textiles, and shoemaking. But when Portugal adopted the euro, in 1999, it lost much of its low-cost advantage to Eastern European countries not yet admitted to the European Union.
“It was almost like we went from a land-based economy to a service-based economy,” Mr. Beja says. “And we had to find a way to use knowledge to become more competitive.”
Collaborating for Capacity
August holidays typically turn Portuguese universities into ghost towns. But in a laboratory at the Technical University of Lisbon one morning last month, a group of graduate students tapped intently on keyboards, wrestling with problems related to using information technology to improve infrastructure in cities, often with research partners an e-mail and ocean away.
The scene embodies the dual goals of the international partnership: Attract top students and engage them in high-caliber, and highly applied, research.
Like many European efforts to use higher education to spur economic growth, the Portuguese strategy is, at least in its conception, top down, driven by government initiative. In Portugal, however, those government officials are also academics—both Mariano Gago, the longtime minister of science, technology, and higher education, and Mr. Heitor, the secretary of state, or deputy minister, are former engineering professors.
Mr. Heitor, a slight, kinetic man with a longstanding academic interest in innovation policy, says it is important to work with top-tier international partners to attract universities and industry alike to the project, as well as to telegraph to the rest of Europe Portugal’s seriousness in developing an innovation economy.
“The international partnerships build credibility,” Mr. Heitor said in an interview in his offices in an 18th-century palace, where faded frescoes contrast with mounted color photographs of computer circuitry, centrifuges, and other high-tech gadgetry.
A country of 10 million, he says, cannot afford to be insular. “To pull up the top of the system, we need international partnerships.”
Equally necessary, Mr. Heitor says, is to get Portuguese universities to work together on common research problems. Individually, many of the country’s 13 public universities lack the capacity to tackle large-scale research projects.
Indeed, persuading domestic institutions to work with perceived competitors proved to be some of the heaviest lifting in setting up the programs, those involved say. When the dean of engineering at MIT traveled to Portugal to meet with his counterparts from several universities there, he asked how frequently they got together, recalls Daniel Roos, the program’s U.S. director. Never, was the answer.
Bridging a Gulf
While the initial impetus for the partnerships came from above, it was up to the faculty members and departments involved in each one to figure out the fit, and thus the arrangements differ in structure. “It’s like we were starting dating,” says Paulo Ferrao, the Portuguese director of the MIT-Portugal program, “and that’s a very personal process.”
Still, all share a focus on research that draws on the strengths of both American and Portuguese partners, has connections to Portuguese industry, and could be broadly attractive to an international market.
A group connected to the Carnegie Mellon partnership, for example, developed high-tech sensors for 500 taxicabs in Porto, Portugal’s second-largest city, to transmit real-time traffic information and allow drivers to steer around congestion and other traffic problems.
One particularly ambitious effort is the “green islands” joint project involving MIT, five Portuguese universities, two utility providers, and Novabase, the IT company, in the Azores, an archipelago nearly 1,000 miles off the Portuguese coast. Shipping fuel to the sparsely settled islands is costly, and researchers are exploring ways to make them less dependent on outside energy sources. The investigators are testing renewable-energy options like installing wind turbines, making a transition to an all-electric-car fleet, and turning entire islands into smart grids, regulating energy usage to respond to peak demands.
The findings of the Azores project could be applicable to islands around the world, as well as to remote areas that are reliant on imported energy, says Carlos Augusto Santos Silva, a researcher and an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the Technical University of Lisbon.
Having MIT’s expertise in working on complex projects such as this “made it easier to bring people to the table,” Mr. Silva says. “Yes, it would have been possible to do this alone, but it wouldn’t have happened as fast.”
António Parada, director of intellectual property at the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology, a multidisciplinary research center based in Porto, says Portuguese companies and universities don’t have a history of cooperation, in part because the country’s industry has not typically been research-intensive. That has been changing over time, but Portuguese companies still spend only the equivalent of 0.2 percent of gross domestic product on research and development.
But the culture clash is visible on both sides. Many Portuguese professors have long been skeptical of applied work, believing it would compromise their research. Mr. Beja, of Novabase, says that about four years ago his company, which has its headquarters in Parque das Nações, a sleek Lisbon neighborhood built for the 1998 World’s Fair, reached out to Portuguese academics doing work in critical fields. Most, he says, never responded, but one professor sent back a “polite” e-mail, detailing the hurdles to university-industry partnerships. The letter concluded, Mr. Beja says, with “It will never work.”
Nurturing New Companies
Despite the earlier rebuff, Novabase was one of three original industrial partners of the Carnegie Mellon-Portugal program, along with Portugal Telecom and Nokia Siemens Networks, the multinational network-communications provider. That partnership alone now involves more than 50 private-sector companies, says Mr. Moura, the U.S. director.
Both sides hope that the connections established through the partnerships’ research projects can be sustained.
“Programs like ours can really steer cooperations,” says Carla Costa, a Ph.D. student in the program who has worked in the country’s growing biotechnology industry. “Students and professors can be bridges between universities and companies.”
Because the Portuguese market is small, some of the corporate partners, like Nokia Siemens, are not homegrown. In fact, one goal of the effort, Mr. Heitor says, is to facilitate the spread of Portuguese technology worldwide.
To that end, the Carnegie Mellon partnership incorporates mentoring for technology-transfer staff at Portuguese universities, while the Texas collaboration includes a business incubator focused on commercialization.
The partnerships already have yielded at least one startup, FeedZai, a software company that helps businesses process large volumes of data quickly. Paulo Marques, one of two assistant professors at the University of Coimbra who founded the company, says he made many important industry contacts while serving as director of a joint master’s-degree program with Carnegie Mellon in software engineering. The company now has 12 employees, just opened an office in London, and is seeking venture-capital financing.
“It’s critical to have someone vouch for you,” Mr. Marques says. “I don’t know if our credibility would have been as great without it.”
Appealing to the Best
Education, of course, is an equally important component of the partnerships. Together, Carnegie Mellon, MIT, and Texas offer three advanced-studies certificates, seven master’s degrees, and 10 doctoral programs. (The youngest partnership, with Harvard Medical School, differs somewhat in that it focuses on postgraduate clinical training and medical education.)
Filipe Martins, a project manager at Novabase, jumped at the chance to enroll in the joint software-engineering program with Carnegie Mellon. The 16-month course—which includes one semester in Pittsburgh and two in Coimbra—gave him skills to advance to a new job at Novabase, which covered his tuition. Mr. Martins and the four other Novabase employees in the program’s first graduating class spend one day a week working on companywide assignments focused on innovation, such as an establishing a new process for ensuring routine feedback on projects.
Portuguese universities hope that the doctoral programs will persuade top Portuguese students to stay at home for graduate studies.
After completing a yearlong internship at a San Francisco biotechnology company, Eunice Costa says she was attracted by a program that “helps you make contacts overseas while letting you keep a foot in your own country.”
Ms. Costa, who is now in her third year of a bioengineering-systems degree, has shuttled between MIT and the New University of Lisbon, where she is doing research with a trio of advisers on materials for tissue engineering.
João Paulo Costeira, an associate professor of systems and robotics at the Technical University of Lisbon, says, “We’re keeping the best.” He notes that four of the top five scorers on a Carnegie Mellon qualifying exam for the doctoral program in electrical and computer engineering were students in the Portugal program. “This is a major accomplishment,” he says.
The partners also hope to attract top international students to a country that “is still a little bit off the map for graduate studies,” says Diogo Aguiar Gomes, a professor of mathematics at the technical university who works with both the Carnegie Mellon and Texas programs. Already, 60 percent of the applicants to the MIT-Portugal program, for one, are foreign.
Even if international students eventually return home, says José Manuel Nunes Castanheira da Costa, rector of the University of Madeira, “They will be building a network.”
Mixed Signals
Although they’re quite happy with the progress they’ve made thus far, Portugal’s university rectors can’t help but worry about the future. What if the government eliminates its support and contracts with their American partners are not renewed? José Viegas, who is co-director of the MIT-Portugal program in sustainable energy and transport systems, says he is already planning for that possibility, setting aside money for an aggressive recruitment campaign. Keeping the program going will be difficult without government support for scholarships because tuition is far above Portuguese, and European, averages.
What’s more, it’s unclear to what extent the American universities would continue their involvement without financial support from the Portuguese government. While Mr. Heitor says less than 3 percent of his agency’s research budget goes to the American institutions, such expenditures could be politically touchy if the country is required to make even deeper budget cuts.
As the renewal period draws close, the jury’s still out on the impact of the partnerships. Even at an institution like the Technical University of Lisbon, where multiple departments are participating in three of the four partnerships, Mr. Viegas, a professor there, estimates only about a 10th of the overall faculty is involved.
Over time, the partnerships could serve as a “positive contagion,” opening more faculty members to research and collaboration with industry and overseas, Mr. Viegas says. But in the short term, it may be difficult for the program to have a broader impact, he says.
Still, supporters point to healthy signs.
The partnerships have helped internationalize Madeira, Portugal’s smallest and youngest public university. All five of the new hires for the Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute, which manages its partnership with Carnegie Mellon, are from abroad.
At the University of Porto, English-speaking support-staff workers have been hired because of the influx of international students, says José Silva Matos, a professor of electrical and computer engineering. And Mr. Costeira, the robotics professor at the Technical University of Lisbon, says teaching assistants from the program are encouraging students to view science and studying abroad more favorably.
More broadly, though, several indicators show that Portugal’s investment in research and education is yielding results. The number of scientific papers published by Portuguese academics in internationally recognized journals increased to 12,108 in 2008, up from 6,597 in 2002. Portugal recently hit the average for industrialized Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development countries in terms of the number of researchers per thousand workers. And for the first time, Portugal is a net exporter of technology.
“It is possible to create wealth and value out of knowledge,” Mr. Matos says. “But it’s not such a short-term thing.”
