Serious Thinking

National Digital Competences Initiative e.2030

by Pedro Guedes de Oliveira*

Conventionally speaking, the National Digital Competences Initiative e.2030 (INCoDe.2030) is not really a programme with a budgetary allocation and with tenders for projects; it is more of an agenda dedicated to mobilising every governmental and society sectors while aiming to put Portugal in a winning position in this new digital transformation context.

In that sense, it is a medium-term (although, digitally speaking, the next decade is already regarded as long-term) transversal programme in its way of operating, either through the type of activities in which is involved or through the sectors of the population to which it is aimed at, that is why it is structured in five action lines:

The inclusion and digital literacies line, which intends to ensure that everyone, in an autonomous and sustained way, is included in this world that is more and more experienced and operationalised through digital means;

The education line, which is aimed towards young people and their education path, seeks to provide them with the necessary technological knowledge, to stimulate them, since the early days of their education, to be able to develop their computational thinking;

The qualification line, through which it is intended to grant the working population with the appropriate professional skills in order to cater for the giant need for human resources that (fortunately) Portugal has been facing more and more each day;

The specialisation line, which is mainly dedicated to the higher education, through which it is intended to train specialists in the vast set of areas and fields that are essential to the development of the change processes that the digital transformation implies;

And finally, the research line, through which it is intended to ensure that Portugal remains a protagonist at an international level in fundamental fields that range from artificial intelligence to advanced computing, from the communications to the need of bringing computing as close to the data generation as possible in some sort of digital subsidiarity, from the energy to the transformation of the productive sector, from the endless world of applications that include the sea, the healthcare, the agriculture, etc.

So, how does INESC TEC positions itself in this context?

Essentially, at two levels: the first one - even though it is not the most relevant one but it is the reason why I’m writing this -, it's because I've been appointed General Coordinator of the initiative (being supported by Sofia Marques da Silva from FPCEUP and by Nuno Rodrigues from IPCA as Assistant Coordinators and by a team of the lines-of-action coordinators and a Technical Secretariat) and this coordination is based on INESC TEC and is funded through a protocol established with FCT; but, above all else, because this initiative can’t be confined to the governmental action and will only have significant results if it is able to mobilise companies as well as public and private actors – from the management itself to universities and polytechnics – and few institutions will have the capacity for action and establishment of organised and effective bridges between the various sectors that INESC TEC does.

* General Coordinator of INCoDe.2030 and Consultant to the Chairman of INESC TEC's Board