Last month EBN welcomed ADDICT – Creative Industries Portugal, the Creative Industries Agency in Portugal.

ADDICT is a non-profit association created in 2008. It currently gathers around 100 members and is recognised by the Ministry for Economy as the coordinator of the Creative Industries Cluster in Portugal.

ADDICT’s mission is to foster a favourable environment for culture and creative economy to thrive, advocating the sector interests and acting as platform for knowledge and innovation.

Among its members, you can find a variety of organisations covering all Cultural and Creative Industries (CCI) sub-sectors as well as several creative hubs (6 CCI Incubators, 4 Universities and other world-class research centres, as the Centre Competence for Future Cities or INESC Technology and Science).

Their competences include:

• to engage and inform the creative community;
• to promote new opportunities;
• to promote and implement collective efficiency strategies;
• to support the development of new businesses;
• to promote national and international visibility for the sector;
• to support the creative regeneration of territories.

Two success story:

UPTEC.PINC – University of Porto’s Incubator of Creative Industries, which was created within the Creative Industries Cluster governmental strategy. Nowadays this incubator, including more or less 30 companies is functioning at cruise speed, offering specific support to each one and implementing a great variety of activities. UPTEC.PINC also implements acceleration and pre-incubation programmes for new entrepreneurs.

Centre for Digital Creativity – Infrastructure created within the Creative Industries Cluster governmental strategy by the Catholic University, other ADDICT co-founder. It is nowadays a fully functional creative hub, providing support through experts and technological and multimedia equipment.

EBN is a network of 160+ quality-certified EU|BICs (business and innovation centres, incubators, accelerators and other support organisations) and 100 Associate Members that support the development and growth of innovative entrepreneurs, start-ups and SMEs.

It is a community of professionals whose day-to-day work guides these businesses to grow in the most effective and efficient way, delivering sustainable impact.

EU|BICs are quality-certified business support organisations, which dedicate their efforts and resources to help entrepreneurs with innovative ideas turn those ideas into viable, successful and sustainable businesses.

EU|BICs were invented almost 30 years ago by the European Commission and by various private and public stakeholders, with the aim to boost the economic development and the innovation potential of European regions. An EU|BIC’s core mission is to accelerate innovative entrepreneurship at the local level, through the customised delivery of a comprehensive range of professional support and incubation services (pre-incubation, incubation, post-incubation) targeted at innovative start-ups, spin-offs, entrepreneurs and SMEs.

For more information download ADDICT’s slide-presentation and visit http://addict.pt/ and http://ebn.eu/