Health Cluster Portugal : origem e caracterização

Abstract

The Health Cluster Portugal (HCP) is a formal institution that aims to increase competitiveness in the research, design, development, manufacture and trade of innovative products and services in the health sector. The set up of this interface was the result of a bottom-up initiative, within the framework of the Norte 2015 debate on policies designed to foster competitiveness based on innovation. It was inspired in the triple helix model with the aim of engaging university, industrial and State players, in an attempt to strengthen coordination and interaction within and among these groups of players. Since it focuses primarily on innovation in the health sector with both a horizontal approach (between competing players) and a vertical one (from research to commercialization), the knowledge base involved is not limited to the analytical, but includes also strong input of synthetic knowledge. In this sense, the HCP must foster an ecology that will stimulate, at the same time, the STI and DUI modes of innovation. The HCP’s ecology of innovation is not restricted to the players directly involved in the local buzz and in face-to-face learning, but considers also an increasingly more global network of pipelines. All in all, this paper aims to explore the origin, the form, the internal organization and the external networks of the HCP, hoping to generalize its potential in promoting innovation, in a knowledge-intensive and globally competitive sector, as is the case of the life science industries.