The Regional Secretary for the Economy, Vasco Cordeiro, presided over the signing ceremony of a cooperation protocol between APIA – Agency for the Promotion of Investment in the Azores and InovCapital – Sociedade de Capital de Risco, SA in Ponta Delgada on Monday morning.
This protocol aims to create a venture capital fund in the amount of one million Euros to support projects that provide business opportunities to micro, small and medium companies in all stages of development.
Tourism, health and welfare, marine sciences and aquaculture, agro-food technologies, environment, renewable energies, biotechnology, information and communication sciences, and applied research are some of the activity areas comprised by the protocol.
For Vasco Cordeiro, this is another mechanism to support entrepreneurship, innovative projects that provide the Azorean business sector with better conditions to carry out its activity.
Thus, the recently amendment to the legal scheme to support Youth Entrepreneurship is a factor that has reinforced the financial mechanism to support projects developed in this context.
Bringing entrepreneurship to schools through a partnership with the University of the Azores and the organisation of the regional entrepreneurship competition was another of measures taken.
The Government is fully aware that there is much to be done in this area; for that reason it will launch a public call for tender for the renewal of entrepreneurship offices in order to develop a proactive approach when monitoring Azorean entrepreneurs and improve the responsiveness to daily requests, mentioned the Regional Secretary.
Mentioning the example of SIDER (Incentive Scheme for Regional Development), Vasco Cordeiro added that this programme has registered 500 applications so far, involving a private investment of nearly 330 million Euros.
It should be stressed that this fund will subsidise 66 projects to be developed in the next 10 years, thus creating 198 jobs, increasing the gross added value in 10 million Euros as well as boosting regional exports in 3.3 million Euros and sharing capital gains with promoters in accordance with the fund’s profitability.