Lisboa Innovation for All

How Lisbon wants to make startups matter to every citizen

Before the Speeches

Back in early 2024, we were still far from the bold speeches that would later punctuate the early months of 2026, with President Ursula von der Leyen talking about Europe needing to be more audacious in innovation and in the startup ecosystem, and pushing forward policies like the 28th regime, meant to make it much easier for any business to operate across EU member states.

Nonetheless, a wave was already forming. Mayor Carlos Moedas (HBS MBA ’00), a former EU commissioner responsible for Europe’s biggest science and innovation budget at the time, had recently gone himself to showcase Lisbon’s achievements in innovation to an EU auditorium, helping Lisbon win the title of European Capital of Innovation.

That award came with a prize money for the city of Lisbon, and in January 2024 we were sitting in his office debating what to do with it. There were ideas floating around: invest in construction, buy equipment for a hub, improve existing infrastructure. But Carlos seemed unconvinced. “We need to innovate,” he said, “in a way that both any citizen from Lisbon and any entrepreneur can understand.”

An Idea with a Purpose

As the driving force behind the growth of the Unicorn Factory Lisboa (the mayor’s flagship initiative to position Lisbon as a leading innovation center in Europe), there was already a growing worry that the innovation ecosystem might become alienated from the rest of the city. The innovation ecosystem spoke (literally) a different language: seed rounds, unicorns, hubs, scale-ups. Carlos, who always believed that innovation comes from bridging different people and different worlds, was not going to be happy if that became true for Lisbon.

“A competition for Lisbon,” he thought. “Let’s give startups the opportunity to help the city solve its problems.”

The meeting was cut short. Something urgent had come up, and he sent us away. “Think about it more and we’ll talk later,” he told us. “For Lisbon, I want this to really work.” He looked at us as he closed the door.

I remember leaving his office with another advisor who had a deep knowledge of Lisbon’s innovation ecosystem. We were both nervous and excited. Could we do something new? Could the local government innovate?

Can the City Innovate?

So we did what we were told. We got to work, brought together teams from the public sector and key partners, and started researching and brainstorming. Slowly, with a lot of work, together, we came up with a new model.

The big headline was that we would launch an international call for applications for tech solutions that could help the city. It had three key subtleties.

First, the prize had to be meaningful. City Hall initiatives are often ignored, and private sector initiatives in Portugal were usually dispersed in small amounts. We had an opportunity to show that Lisbon could be bold. If we were going to do this, it had to feel real, not symbolic.

Second, the model itself had to go beyond simply awarding a prize. The call would open internationally, a shortlist would be selected, and finalists would come to Lisbon for six months. During those six months, they would receive support, resources, and access to the right institutions and partners to implement and prove their concepts directly with the population of Lisbon that would be their target market. In other words, this would not be a cheque and a handshake. It would be a real proof of concept, with the city acting as a platform. The prize was announced in May 2024, and in September 2024 we had over 300 applications from 40 different countries.

Third, and perhaps most surprisingly, the key part was choosing the problems. This was obviously political, because to name the city’s biggest issues is to say out loud where the city is vulnerable. But the Mayor took a bold stance. There would be three categories: quality of education, access to healthcare, and integration of migrants. These were areas he was increasingly worried about, and where he believed technology could play a supporting role. It would not have been enough to come up with fake or comfortable problems. That would have been politically safer, perhaps, but intellectually dishonest. If we were asking entrepreneurs to spend their time in Lisbon, then we had to be serious about the problems we were asking them to address.

We only had to come up with the name. After many discussions, we landed on one: Lisboa Innovation for All. That was what it was all about.

We had no time to waste. An independent international panel was assembled to assess the applications and select the finalists. Soon, the pilots were launched, and a large team was put in place to support each startup’s implementation. The operational and logistical challenges were many, but the teams responded with energy; this was something new and exciting. The work was tailored to each finalist: opening doors to hospitals and clinics, daycare centres, senior centres, schools, foundations, and migrant-serving organisations. The finalists were announced in October 2024, and each had six months to test, improve, and refine its solution in Lisbon, with direct support from the city.

The Pilots

During the pilot period, a broader campaign also took shape. The startups were having day-to-day contact with the population, but their story also mattered. Videos spread across social media in which each founder or team spoke candidly about the problem they wanted to solve, how it connected personally to them and how they were interacting with Lisbon in practice.

For example, Usawa Care, which offered 24/7 access to a paediatrician for parents through WhatsApp using an AI-enabled clinical model, made innovation immediately tangible. During the pilot, it served hundreds of new families in Lisbon, helped many avoid unnecessary in-person care, and earned strong user satisfaction. Innovation, suddenly, was not a slogan. It was a parent getting quick medical guidance when they needed it.

Growappy showed a different but equally important face of innovation. Its platform used AI to reduce bureaucracy for teachers, improve communication with families, and make education more personalized from the earliest years. During the pilot, teachers saved time on administrative work, multilingual communication improved, and schools were able to use technology in a way that felt practical rather than performative.

Equivalence, meanwhile, addressed one of the city’s most difficult and most human challenges: migrant integration. Founded by migrant women, it built a tool to help migrants translate their education, skills, and professional experience into a format the Portuguese labour market could understand. Its early results were strong, but more important was the deeper point: it treated integration not just as employability, but as confidence, belonging, and the ability to become visible again in a new country.

By the end of the proof-of-concept phase, we were learning something important: when you give startups access not only to money but also to support from institutions, users, and real civic problems, you get a very different kind of innovation. In June 2025, these 3 companies were announced the winners, among the very strong competition of the total 9 finalist teams. Each winner received half of its prize money, and was given further six months to continue implementing its pilot sustainably in Lisbon.

What the City Had Built

Reflecting back, I still ask myself: what did we actually create?

Was our model something like Y Combinator, but through public-sector institutions? Broadly, maybe. Except City Hall did not take equity, which already makes it much cheaper for entrepreneurs. Or is it something like the outstanding Bloomberg Mayor Challenge? Close to it, maybe. Except here the City Hall was an enabler and not the driving force in the specific initiatives. So maybe a mix of both. But what is more interesting is that when you apply a mix model through a public institution, what you get in return is not just company growth. You also get legitimacy, trust, and community building. People can see in their own lives what innovation can do. They can test it, argue with it, benefit from it, and judge it.

I still think that distinction matters.

Why Local Innovation Matters

Reflecting back, I believe this project helped strengthen the ecosystem’s growth. Unicorn Factory Lisboa has grown fivefold since its launch in 2022, with 300 businesses joining in 2025, up from 250 the previous year, while continuing to provide advice and support to founders through dedicated hubs for AI, blockchain, gaming, health, and green tech. It has also become a destination for international leaders visiting Lisbon to exchange ideas and discuss innovation.

Now, hearing European leaders speak about reducing barriers for start-ups, helping entrepreneurs operate more easily across borders, and trying to make the single market feel more like a single market, it is clear that public ambition at the EU level matters. But that alone is not enough.

Because Carlos knows something that Brussels also knows: change only becomes politically real when people can feel them. There needs to be strong local and regional initiatives that turn broad policy ambition into visible support for innovators. We need to be able to translate politically to people who have never thought much about tech in their lives why these investments might matter to them, to their children, and to their city.

We wanted—and still want—a grandmother hearing startup jargon not to be skeptical, but to think of something useful she now uses and to feel proud that maybe her grandkids, just out of college, might decide to build something new.

As we were leaving Carlos’s office on that first day, we had a lot of naive ambitions. Could we innovate? Could we bring people together? Could we show once again that the public sector can also innovate?

What made a real difference was that Carlos’s instinct not to settle for the obvious was shared more widely, especially by the outstanding public sector teams. Everyone understood the part they had to play, but no one saw that role as fixed or approached it in the usual way. Instead, people questioned, adapted, and innovated within their own jobs, always asking whether there might be a better way.

That, more than any speech, prize, or slogan, is the only way there will ever be innovation for all.

P.S. For further reading, I suggest the recent publications: 1) The Financial Times article “Portugal welcomes start-ups seeking scale: Hubs in Lisbon, Porto and Braga nurture new businesses as they look to expand”, March 5, 2026; and 2) HBS Alumni Stories, “Second Life, In Lisbon”, March 1, 2026.

João Sátiro Coelho (MBA ‘27) is originally from Faro and Lisbon, Portugal. He graduated from Instituto Superior Técnico with a master’s in architecture. Before HBS, João practiced architecture, then worked at McKinsey & Company in Lisbon, served as a direct advisor to the Mayor Carlos Moedas at Lisbon City Hall, where he focused on several initiatives, including coordinating the city’s partnership with Bloomberg Associates, the consulting arm of Bloomberg Philanthropies.