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INESC TEC is part of Raw Materials Consortium of European Institute of Innovation and Technology
INESC TEC was recently selected by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) to join the Raw Materials consortium. INESC TEC is the sole Portuguese research centre to be part of this team. Three years after creating the Knowledge Innovation Communities (KICs) for the areas of climate change, renewable energy and ICT, Raw Materials are the new challenge of EIT, in which Portugal is represented by INESC TEC.
For this pan-European partnership, with over 100 top partners from 22 EU countries, representing industry, research and academy, INESC TEC will contribute with robotic technology that will make it possible to extract ore underwater and explore the deep sea.
The EIT Raw Materials is the strongest partnership ever created for the raw materials sector, and its goal is to strengthen innovation by introducing new solutions, products and services that will make it possible to sustainably explore, extract, process and recycle raw materials. Overall, the EIT wants to make the challenge of dependence on raw materials a European strategic force.
“As established in the 2013-2020 National Strategy for the Sea, this sector is strategic to Portugal due to the country’s diversity in minerals, both on land and at sea. To explore these resources, it is necessary to develop technology, and so being part of this Consortium is extremely important not only to INESC TEC, but also to the national research in this area”, explains José Manuel Mendonça, president of INESC TEC.
The Raw Materials KIC will have its headquarters in Berlin and in six other cross-border centres in Wroclaw (Poland), Espoo (Finland), Leuven (Belgium), Lulea (Sweden), Metz (France) and Rome (Italy). INESC TEC will be associated with the Belgian centre.
By providing technical scientific results, the Consortium aims to create a social and economic impact, develop new businesses and business opportunities, and bring in investors and entrepreneurs that will contribute to the economic development of these areas. In its turn, the entire operation will boost the competitiveness of the European sector of raw materials and generate new, highly qualified jobs.
Until 2020, the consortium aims to support and develop over 40 incubated ideas, create 16 start-ups, train over a thousand MSc students and commercialise over 70 patents.
INESC TEC’s participation in this KIC part of the objectives of the TEC4SEA infrastructure, acknowledged by the FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, Portuguese funding agency) as a national strategic infrastructure. In particular, INESC TEC is developing project ‘Turtle’, an autonomous dual-use technology for the deep sea.
INESC TEC, January 2015
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