The events were very useful to consolidate the awareness of the policy objectives of the Digital Agenda amongst a wider group of stakeholders and interested participants. It was nice to see quite a lot of young people participating in the events.

Several successful cases of bridges between R&D and Innovation were presented with concrete examples of ICT/high-tech SMEs. However, that is one of the key points raised as a challenge that Europe needs to seriously tackle. Portuguese interlocutors consider of strategic relevance the aspects of innovation in the ICT domain. They link it very much with the need to support the university/SME communication to help start-ups passing what was called the "maturity syndrome". This happens after a successful prototyping phase when technologies and services have to be converted into products for wider commercialization.

The plea to the Commission in this regard relates to simplification of the R&D&I programmes, avoiding bureaucracy and betting on good measures to accompany the emerging SMEs in these early phases. It was recognised that this work needs very good coordination with innovation policies in the Member States (e.g. need to simplify management and control rules for structural funds in R&D&I projects, similarly Horizon2020, and to establish targets for the share of structural funds to be applied on R&D&I).

Some recurrent messages from the various panels and discussion fora include:

Smart money, rather than 'big' money: funding need to be more widely available to real innovative approaches (by essence with a high degree of unpredictability) at higher levels of granularity (spin-offs, SMEs…) rather than concentrated in bigger, more traditional consortia.

Need for out-of-the-box thinking: breakthroughs tend to come from fresh, unprecedented approaches, rather at the margins or the borders of traditional scientific or technological conventional disciplines, thus a need for more open-ended type of projects, at least on an experimental basis. An interesting example given was the panel on the interface between art and science in Porto's eLearning Café session, where the normally multi-task approach and open, imaginative way of functioning of the artistic brain was deemed to be of help in frontier science research.

Multidisciplinary/Transdisciplinarity: growingly solutions to social challenges require multidisciplinary skills cutting across several different areas, which traditional compartmented academic curricula not always match. This is normally the case with R&D&I at the cross-road of ICT and science, such as bioinformatics, genomics, speech technology, etc. Interesting examples of the latter were presented in the Lisbon IST session 'Serious Games'), illustrating how ICT, rendering algorithms and other software tools can be used to develop multi-modal interfaces, voice interaction and games as educational tools with a myriad of media and other applications (eHealth, entertainment…).

Interoperability: multidisciplinary/transdisciplinarity and the pervasive nature of ICT for any intelligent system (smart cities, smart transport, smart spaces, etc.) requires the possibility to pool together, network and constantly update/improve complex systems build up on the basis of different tools and techniques and massive sets of data, including from users (crowd sourcing), all of which depend on open standards, protocols and platforms to ensure interoperability.