This workshop was the first of a series of debates, called “Innovation in Aeronautics Roundtables”, that will allow participants to discuss and to gather complementary points of view in terms of research results in this area, and opportunities and challenges facing the aeronautics industry.

The debates are being organised as part of the Entrepreneurial Research Initiative (ERI) “Innovation Dynamics in Aeronautics and Embraer in Évora: Towards a Distributed Platform for Entrepreneurial Initiatives, New Employment and Skills Development”, launched by the Carnegie Mellon Portugal (CMU Portugal) Program and financed by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology.

The purpose of this ERI is to study the creation of networks of suppliers in the aeronautics industry, the technological advances and challenges of the sector, and the necessary skills for the factories to become centres of excellence. This project is motivated by the installation of two new Embraer plants in Évora, Portugal, with the ultimate goal of securing their role as centres of excellence in aeronautics.

The INESC TEC team involved in the project is composed of Ana Cristina Barros, Cláudio Santos, Dario Messina, António Lucas Soares, Américo Azevedo and Jorge Pinho de Sousa. Nationally, the project partners are the Center for Innovation, Technology and Policy Research (IN+) of the Instituto Superior Técnico of the University of Lisbon (IST/UL), Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), the Institute of Mechanical Engineering (IDMEC), IST, the Centre of Excellence for Innovation in the Automotive Industry (CEIIA), and Embraer Portugal.

The INESC TEC researchers mentioned in this article are associated with the following partner institutions: INESC Porto and FEUP.

INESC TEC, January 2015