Compete Releases €182.5 Million Productive Innovation Tender to SME Pre-Registrants After Eleven-Month Wait — Envelope Trimmed From the €254 Million Initial Frame

Compete 2030, the Portuguese state programme that manages competitiveness funding under the Portugal 2030 (PT2030) European Structural and Investment Funds frame, will publish before the end of this week the long-delayed Sistema de Incentivos à Inovação Produtiva (SI Inovação Produtiva, Productive Innovation Incentive System) call for small and medium-sized enterprises (PME, Pequenas e Médias Empresas). Pedro Vinagre, president of Compete, confirmed the timing on 4 June 2026; eligible firms had been waiting since July 2025, when a pre-registration window opened to capture binding investment intentions ahead of the tender publication.

The funding envelope lands at €182.5 million for the call — split between Norte, Centro and Alentejo NUTS-II regions plus the Lisbon and Algarve allocations under the more-developed-region ceiling. The figure is down from the €254 million envelope that Compete had initially programmed: the difference reflects reallocations toward complementary calls already publicado earlier in the cycle, and a tighter framing of eligible operations after the European Commission's mid-period review of the Portugal 2030 operational programme. The co-financing rate sits at 40% of total eligible cost under the standard regional-aid map, with up to 50% in convergence regions for micro and small enterprises.

Eligible operations divide along three lanes: the establishment of a new productive unit; the expansion of an existing facility by at least 20% of installed capacity, measured by output, employment or floor area; and the fundamental modernisation of production processes — typically a capex-heavy automation or robotisation programme triggered by a documented technology jump. The intangible-asset bucket — software, patents, licences, certifications — qualifies up to 50% of total cost for medium enterprises and up to 60% for micro and small. Investments inside a Plano Regional para a Especialização Inteligente (RIS3) priority area carry a 5-percentage-point uplift in the aid intensity.

The pre-registration mechanism that opened in July 2025 — unusual in the Portuguese funding pipeline — collected binding statements of investment intention together with first-cut project plans, allowing Compete to gauge demand and pre-vet projects before locking the formal tender frame. Firms that pre-registered keep priority access in the application queue and benefit from accelerated technical evaluation. New applicants can still file, but are expected to face a higher bar on technological merit and a tighter window inside the four-month application phase that the tender will open on publication.

The eleven-month gap between pre-registration and tender launch sits at the centre of complaints from the industrial-base associations — AIP, AEP, CIP — that took the matter publicly to the Ministério da Economia in March. The delay is widely attributed to mid-period adjustments to the Portugal 2030 indicators framework, plus a sequence of state-aid notifications routed through DG COMP that ran longer than the standard cycle. Compete has indicated that the next Sistema de Incentivos call — on internationalisation — will follow inside the third quarter, but no exact envelope has yet been disclosed.

The launch of the SI Inovação Produtiva call is the largest single capital injection into the Portuguese PME base programmed for the second half of 2026. It also feeds directly into the Banco de Portugal's downside-revised PIB (Produto Interno Bruto, Gross Domestic Product) forecast for the year — corporate fixed investment is the headline component the BdP flagged in its March bulletin as the weakest contributor to growth, and the Compete pipeline is the chief disbursement vehicle through which the European Recovery and Resilience Plan and the PT2030 envelope reach the SME balance sheet.