The IST SPIN-OFF community was established in 2009 by Instituto Superior Técnico, to publicize success stories in business that began in some manner within the school’s walls among other reasons.
Priberam, Link Consulting, Omnidea or VoiceInteraction are just some of the big names created by researchers, students or teachers of Técnico who are proud to be considered, officially, a spin-off of Técnico. To promote collaborations and relationships between companies with school-related origins, to strengthen these companies’ links with Técnico, and to encourage students and researchers to create even more companies are other goals of this community: the ambition of Técnico is to become an international reference for technology-based entrepreneurship.
Priberam Informática, SA is a good example of national and international success: launched in 1989, today it is one of the references in the field of language technology, with FLiP (Ferramentas para a Língua Portuguesa -Tools for the Portuguese Language) being one of their most sought-after products. This service includes spell checkers, dictionaries, syntactic and stylistic correctors, translation aids, etc., and is available in European as well as Brazilian Portuguese, which dramatically increased the international visibility of the company.
According to Priberam, “permanent innovation is essential to make products and services the best available in the market, thus contributing to the success of the people who use them”. “What moves us is a constant motivation to improve our products and services, incorporating in them state-of-the-art technology, content and functionality in a creative way.” This motto applies to many of the companies that are part of the community, which has its origins in the creation of innovative technology, often developed within an academic context, applied to market-oriented problems.
Another example is VoiceInteraction, that with “a solid base” of research and development (R & D) presents innovative solutions centred on speech processing technologies. The goal is to improve the user interface, for example in access to content, because the founders believe “that speaking will be, in the future, the preferred interface in access to information technology”.
Interestingly, both companies have emerged from within INESC-ID’s walls, an associate laboratory of Instituto Superior Técnico, which operates in various areas: computational processing of spoken Portuguese, information and decision support systems, interactive virtual environments, embedded electronic systems and communications and mobility networks.
There are, however, many companies of the IST SPIN-OFF community that operate in other areas: Terraprima, for example, is primarily engaged in the inventory and quantification of the environmental impacts of human activities and the creation of systems to compensate such impacts; HeartGenetics applies computational and genetic innovations in order to change the practice of medicine; Lusospace provides space technology to the European Space Agency.
Every year, the community has a formal meeting at Técnico, to which all members are invited as well as those interested from within the school community, reinforcing the objectives of strengthening the connection with the school and promoting inter-business cooperation. This is also when, every year, new IST SPIN-OFF members are integrated, in an official ceremony attended by the president of Instituto Superior Técnico.
This year, the meeting will take place on November 18, at 6pm, at the congress centre – a brief presentation of the companies that will become members of the community can be found on the following pages.
