Drive towards visualization of the new economy in Porto

There is a platform that maps out the entrepreneurial ecosystem in the city

Portugal’s second main city, Porto, wants to be a bright spot on the European map of innovative and entrepreneurial cities. For that purpose, already back in 2019, the city joined the online platform of the European Scale Cities network, which has the goal of mapping out and visualizing the connections and interdependencies that exist among the different start-ups, scale-ups and investors that drive the new wave of economy and industrialization on the continent.

Porto is thus one out of 14 forward-thinking cities that make up the rapidly growing and expanding entrepreneurial ecosystem in Europe. However, initially, each works on presenting its particular local ecosystem on the platform so it can serve as a transparency tool to all interested stakeholders and actors who want to get a peek and a sense of the vibrancy and vitality of the regional start-up scenes.

The project in Porto is led by the City Council and local universities

At the time of writing this article, there are more than 19 000 verified start-ups in the 14 city members of the network (among them Amsterdam, Barcelona, Helsinki and Berlin). The Portuguese city has more than 500 such operations but the good news is that in 2019 it was considered one of the fastest-growing places in that respect, attesting to its potential as a city of innovation and digitization.

Two years ago the municipal government in conjunction with the leading local universities, such as the University of Porto, the Polytechnic Institute of Porto and the National Innovation Agency launched the ScaleUp Porto initiative which has the goal to map and continuously update the information about the technology entrepreneurship landscape in the city so that it will be a useful marker for future investors and researchers, and even an inspiration to future entrepreneurs.

Reliable and current information is power and the authorities of Porto are well aware of that and with this tool, they want to encourage start-ups and scale-ups to freely join into the network and contribute towards the promotion of their city as a reference point of innovation.