Porto Digital: on the way to the knowledge based society City of ...

Intellectual property
A very innovative product was developed: the real estate e-system (still at a prototype
stage), which will allow buying and selling real estate property through the Internet. This
required innovative intellectual property mechanisms. The ownership of the system
belongs to the <strong>Porto</strong> <strong>Digital</strong> Association.
Partners’ financial contribution
Being financed 75% by public money, the project had to find the remaining 25% among
their partners. Instead of asking the same level of contribution from all of them, the project
management called for differentiated efforts according to the financial capacity and
relevance of participation of the partners. Thus, some of them agreed in contributing more
than 25% of their budget, while others gave a symbolic contribution of 1%.
3.5. Key implementation obstacles and problem-solving practices
The structure of the national programme within which the project was financed, Portugal
<strong>Digital</strong>, had a rather small team, which led to delays in the approval of intermediate reports
and subsequently delays in the payments. Furthermore, the Portugal <strong>Digital</strong> national
programme had no specific guidelines, which led to different interpretations about the
procedures to be followed.
In order to alleviate these problems, the project manager tried to make sure that every
reporting document sent to the project officer had no formal mistakes in order to be
processed more quickly. For this purpose, he created a software programme based on
Excel spreadsheets, which detected errors whenever any partner introduced wrong
information (e.g. mistaken figures, lack of figures) in the spreadsheets. With this, the
partners had to correct the information before submitting their part of the report to the
project manager. The project officer was informed about this procedure and the way it
worked. This led to a faster processing of all the reports submitted by the <strong>Porto</strong> <strong>Digital</strong>
consortium to the national programme managing authority.
Late payments caused delays in the project implementation. For instance, the financial
execution of the project was quite low at the beginning (in the first year less than 15%). In
order to overcome this major difficulty the <strong>Porto</strong> <strong>Digital</strong> Association, with the agreement
of its four founders, had to take bank loans to proceed.
4. INNOVATION RESULTS
Wide coverage of a broadband network infrastructure throughout the city
While the Portugal <strong>Digital</strong> national programme was applied in 28 Portuguese cities and
regions, only <strong>Porto</strong> <strong>Digital</strong> managed to build an infrastructure on such a scale. The network
will allow the connection of the schools in the city at all levels, establishing e-
communications between them for free. This infrastructure is to be commercially exploited
in the future (planned to start in the first semester of 2008) through business agreements to
be established with Internet service provider companies.
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