Gallery of the Uncommon

A happy day

On 28 May, we inaugurated our Industry and Innovation Lab. It was an event full of pomp and circumstance, associated to ANI's initiative “Technological Demonstrator”.

The session began at INESC TEC’s auditorium and was attended by the Secretary of State of Economy, the Chairman of ANI and, of course, the Chairman of INESC TEC. Then, the participants were divided into two groups in order to visit two important laboratories of INESC TEC, one of them with the honour of being inaugurated.

The communication teams of ANI and INESC TEC, which are used to organise events, tried to anticipate any unforeseen circumstances that could happen. And a lot of things could have gone wrong: a delay in starting the event, multimedia technical problems in the opening session, deafening noise from the construction works next to INESC TEC building, low participation, crazy robots moving when they shouldn’t or inanimate during demonstrations. Anyway, the list could be long.

But after all, everything went just fine, except perhaps for the scissors that cut the ribbon. In fact, it even properly cut the ribbon, which was double and wide. But unlike the new Laboratory, it was a traditional Portuguese scissors, that is, anything but high-tech. Some even commented that it should have been an XL scissors to cut the ribbon, or that we should have invested in a laser cut. Or a Robot Scissorhands?

That’s it. Besides the collaboration opportunities that emerged from the interaction between the approximately 100 participants, here is another business idea for researchers of the new lab.