Manuel Castro Almeida Backs the €900 Million PITCH Innovation Park Bid for the European Competitiveness Fund — Universidade do Porto, Politécnico and the Câmara Stage a Three-Phase Build to a 2029 Opening

The Minister of Economy, Manuel Castro Almeida, told reporters in Porto on Friday that the Government will back the candidacy of PITCH — Porto Innovation and Technology Community Hub — to the next cycle of European funds, a project priced at €900 million across three phases and pitched as one of the largest innovation parks Europe will see this decade. The €900 million sticker is the headline; the political endorsement is the news.

PITCH is a three-way partnership between the Universidade do Porto (University of Porto), the Instituto Politécnico do Porto (Porto Polytechnic Institute, set to be reorganised as the future Universidade Técnica do Porto) and the Câmara Municipal do Porto (Porto City Council). The project is structured as a science-and-technology park at a regional scale, with space designed to host both small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and large multinational technology companies, and with the academic partners providing the research, prototyping and human-capital pipeline that the firms anchor to.

The investment is staged in three blocks. The first, a 'Hub Central' (Central Hub) carrying interface spaces, offices, laboratories, prototyping centres and auditoriums, is priced at €150 million. The second, the 'Corporate Zone', is built around the multinationals and corporate innovation centres at €250 million. The third, the 'expansion zone' for startups and corporate campuses, takes the bulk of the budget at €500 million. Added together, the three phases land at the headline €900 million figure.

Where the money comes from is the open question. Castro Almeida pointed specifically to the European Competitiveness Fund — the next-Multiannual-Financial-Framework instrument the European Commission is preparing as a successor competitiveness vehicle for the bloc, with a proposed envelope close to €400 billion across all member states. That is a different funding track from the closing Portugal 2030 cycle and from the Plano de Recuperação e Resiliência (PRR, Recovery and Resilience Plan), and the minister's message to Porto was that the Government will negotiate the PITCH envelope when the new fund's allocation rounds open in 2027.

'É muito bom que os principais centros do país comecem a preparar projetos de escala e de ambição europeia' (It is very good that the country's main centres begin to prepare projects of European scale and ambition), Castro Almeida said, framing PITCH as the template he wants to see replicated in other Portuguese metropolitan areas. The political subtext is that Porto wants a share of the next EU cycle scaled to its actual research base — the Universidade do Porto consistently ranks as the country's largest research-output university — rather than seeing the bigger envelopes default to Lisbon-anchored consortia.

Operationally, the partners are aiming for the first phase to be operational by 2029. That is tight for a build of this scale. The Câmara has the planning authority and is expected to fast-track the urban-planning instruments; the two academic partners bring the land in or adjacent to their existing campuses; and the Instituto Politécnico's reorganisation into a Universidade Técnica do Porto, currently working through the relevant legal steps, is meant to consolidate the academic interface that PITCH will plug into.

For the Porto tech ecosystem the PITCH bid is the second public-investment marker in a year, after the city's continued positioning around the Web Summit afterglow and the existing Porto Innovation Hub. For Castro Almeida, putting the Ministry of Economy's name on the bid early is a way to mark the Government's preference inside the inter-ministerial conversation about which Portuguese projects get sent to Brussels first.