Eight new business spaces expand the island’s technology and innovation ecosystem, which already brings together 98 projects and entities, more than 340 qualified professionals and people from 14 nationalities
For islands, one of the most persistent economic questions is not simply how to create opportunity, but how to make opportunity remain. Talent can be educated locally and leave; ideas can be born on an island and developed elsewhere; young professionals can love the place from which they come and still conclude that their future requires another geography. The expansion of TERINOV on Terceira Island speaks directly to that challenge. More than the enlargement of a physical building, the investment represents an effort to increase the island’s capacity to welcome technology-based companies, entrepreneurs, researchers and highly qualified professionals, strengthening an ecosystem in which innovation and knowledge can become instruments not only of economic growth, but of demographic and professional permanence. The newly expanded infrastructure was formally inaugurated in a ceremony attended by Fátima Amorim, President of the Municipality of Angra do Heroísmo, marking another stage in TERINOV’s development as a center for companies, projects and professionals connected to innovation and the knowledge economy.
The expansion was promoted by the Regional Government of the Azores, with financing from the Recovery and Resilience Plan (PRR), and created eight new business spaces, together with the supporting facilities required to accommodate additional technology-based companies. The enlarged infrastructure also includes meeting rooms, shared and technical areas, as well as a photovoltaic energy-production unit for self-consumption. The combination is significant: the project is intended not simply to provide additional offices, but to strengthen the environment in which businesses and innovative projects can develop, collaborate and establish themselves on Terceira.
An Ecosystem of 98 Projects and More Than 340 Professionals
The most compelling measure of TERINOV, however, may be found not in the additional square meters but in the community already working within them. According to the information released in connection with the expansion, TERINOV currently hosts 98 projects and entities, 90 of them business-related, involving more than 340 qualified professionals representing 14 nationalities. The ecosystem has also contributed to the establishment in the Region of more than 50 highly qualified professionals, while participating in research, development and innovation projects.
For an island economy, those figures carry particular weight. Attracting a company is important; attracting the people who create, manage and expand that company is equally consequential. And when professionals decide not simply to work temporarily in the Azores but to establish themselves there, innovation begins to intersect with one of the archipelago’s oldest challenges: retaining human capital. The presence of 14 nationalities also suggests another dimension of the emerging ecosystem. Terceira is not only attempting to prevent talent from leaving; it is developing the capacity to bring new talent into the island, creating professional networks that connect a relatively small Atlantic territory with knowledge and experience originating far beyond it.
From Peripheral Geography to a Geography of Knowledge
For the Municipality of Angra do Heroísmo, the expansion represents an opportunity to consolidate Terceira as a territory capable of attracting and retaining talent, investment and knowledge, while strengthening the island’s economic and scientific fabric. “The expansion of TERINOV represents an important strengthening of the conditions available on Terceira Island to host companies, attract investment and create opportunities for qualified professionals,” Fátima Amorim said. “It is particularly relevant that this investment contributes to strengthening an innovation ecosystem that has increasingly established Terceira as a territory with the capacity to create and retain talent and knowledge.”
Her words touch upon a larger question confronting island societies. Geography once determined with considerable rigidity where certain kinds of economic activity could occur. Industrial production required proximity to raw materials and markets; large professional sectors clustered around metropolitan centers; advanced research tended to concentrate around major universities, laboratories and corporations. The knowledge economy has not abolished geography, but it has altered some of its rules. Digital connectivity, research networks, technological entrepreneurship and specialized innovation can allow smaller and more distant territories to participate in economic activities once associated almost exclusively with large urban centers.
For the Azores, this possibility is particularly significant. The islands cannot compete with metropolitan regions through scale. Their strength must often come instead through specialization, knowledge, distinctive resources, scientific collaboration and the ability to create environments in which talented people can build meaningful professional lives without necessarily leaving the archipelago. Infrastructure such as TERINOV becomes relevant precisely within that context.
A Building Matters When It Creates What Happens Beyond It
The expansion also illustrates the potential relationship between public investment and entrepreneurial activity. The Regional Government’s PRR-supported infrastructure provides the physical conditions; TERINOV creates an environment for incubation, innovation and knowledge transfer; companies and research projects bring ideas and economic activity; professionals bring skills; and the surrounding community potentially benefits through employment, collaboration and investment. The inclusion of meeting and shared areas recognizes that innovation frequently emerges through interaction rather than isolation, while photovoltaic generation for self-consumption introduces an element of environmental sustainability into the infrastructure itself.
But the true test of such an investment will necessarily come after the inauguration. Technology parks cannot be measured only by occupancy or by the number of rooms they contain. Their lasting value lies in what those spaces produce: companies that survive and grow, research that becomes applicable knowledge, collaborations that reach markets beyond the islands, qualified employment that offers younger generations reasons to remain, and outside professionals who discover that an Atlantic island can become not simply a beautiful place to visit but a serious place in which to work, create and invest.
Making Terceira a Place Where the Future Can Stay
The Municipality of Angra do Heroísmo has indicated that it will continue to follow and value the development of this ecosystem, recognizing innovation, science and knowledge as instruments for creating new opportunities and strengthening Terceira’s position. That commitment points toward a broader vision of economic development in which the future of an island is not dependent upon any single sector. Agriculture, tourism, commerce and traditional industries remain fundamental, but a resilient island economy also needs new layers—technology, research, entrepreneurship, digital activity and the professions generated by knowledge itself.
TERINOV’s expansion therefore carries a meaning larger than eight additional business spaces. Behind the physical enlargement is an attempt to enlarge the possibilities of Terceira: to make room for another company, another research project, another entrepreneur, another scientist or highly qualified professional who might otherwise have worked somewhere else.
For generations, the Azorean story was often defined by the departure of talent. Ambition frequently required a ticket outward, and professional possibility was imagined on the other side of the sea. Places such as TERINOV cannot erase that history, nor can any technology park alone reverse the complex forces that lead people to migrate. But they can help write a different chapter—one in which an island does not merely educate talent and watch it leave, but creates conditions for knowledge to arrive, ideas to develop, investment to take root and qualified people to remain. Because the most important measure of innovation on an island may not be how many ideas it can create, but how many futures it can persuade to stay.
Based on a Press Release from Angra do Heroísmo, and other press repeorts. Photos from the municipality and TERINOV.