Afonso Amaral, Dual Degree Ph.D. student at Instituto Superior Técnico and Carnegie Mellon’s Engineering and Public Policy Department (CMU Portugal) co-authored the winning paper of the “Babbage Industrial Innovation Policy Awards”.

The competition was created during the pandemic with the aim of finding innovative and multi-disciplinary insights to enhance the design and development of public policies in the areas of technology, innovation and industrial competitiveness.

The paper “National and Sub-National Policy for Domestic Manufacturing Flexibility: A Policy Framework to Incentivize Flexibility Based on Lessons from the Covid-19 Medical Supply Response” – developed in co-authorship with Nikhil Kalathil, a CMU student – involved “combining several good practices from the United States of America and European Union member states, and developing a set of public policies to increase the industries’ manufacturing flexibility”, explained Afonso Amaral.

In addition to the monetary prize, the winners had the opportunity to present their research to a group of world-renowned academics affiliated with the Cambridge Industry Innovation Policy Center.

The researcher at the Center for Innovation, Technology and Policy Research (IN+) says “it is fantastic to show that a prestigious engineering school can work as a bridge between technology and public policies”.