Winners of this year’s i9.Açores – Young Academy of Innovative Ideas are spending several days in Madrid on an Entrepreneurship Mission designed to transform a regional competition into an international learning experience. Thirteen students, accompanied by their teachers, are visiting universities, innovation hubs, entrepreneurs, and creative projects while exploring one of Europe’s major capitals.
An innovative idea often begins in a classroom, with a question simple enough to be overlooked: could this be done differently? For a group of young Azoreans, ideas developed in schools across the archipelago have now become passports to a larger world. The winners of the 2026 edition of i9.Açores, held in May on Graciosa, are in Madrid until September 12 for an Entrepreneurship Mission combining innovation, education, creativity and cultural discovery.
Promoted and financed by the Regional Secretariat for Youth, Housing and Employment through the Regional Directorate for Youth, the initiative brings together more than a dozen students and teachers. Its purpose goes beyond rewarding the winners of a competition. By placing young people in contact with entrepreneurs, institutions and projects outside the islands, the mission allows them to see how ideas move from imagination toward implementation—and how innovation increasingly depends upon networks extending beyond geography.
Among the institutions included in the Madrid program are IE University’s IE Tower and PATIO Campus, an innovation and sustainability hub. These encounters expose Azorean students to environments in which entrepreneurship, technology, sustainability and creative thinking intersect, offering them perspectives that can later be carried back to their schools and communities.
The projects that earned the students their places in Madrid reveal the breadth of that imagination. Sofia Sousa and Miguel Lima of EBI de Capelas, accompanied by teacher Guida Medeiros, won the second-cycle category with “Eco Moldar.” Íris Olaio of EBS da Graciosa, accompanied by Cristina Fraga, was recognized in the third-cycle category for “Biopalha: Cogumelos Sustentáveis.” From EBS das Flores, Rafaela Leal and Íris Câmara, accompanied by Patrícia Resende, won the secondary-school category with “Mar & Patas.” At university level, Samuel Gonçalves and Miguel Santos, students at the University of Lisbon and University of Porto, won with “Bio Spark.”
The mission also recognizes that education does not occur only inside laboratories, classrooms or innovation centers. Participants are discovering Madrid through a cultural itinerary that includes museums, public spaces and major landmarks, among them the Museum of Illusions, Gran Vía, Retiro Park and Warner Park. Such experiences matter particularly for young people from an island region: travel becomes another form of education, expanding cultural references and revealing different ways in which cities organize creativity, knowledge and public life.
i9.Açores is the annual regional competition in innovative ideas and represents the culmination of the Entrepreneurial Academy – School of Leaders, an entrepreneurship-education program reaching Azorean children and young people across different levels of education, including vocational and higher education as well as social-solidarity institutions. Its significance lies precisely in that continuity. Entrepreneurship is presented not simply as the creation of businesses, but as a way of teaching young people to recognize problems, imagine alternatives, collaborate and convert ideas into projects.
For the Azores, investing in this kind of experience also carries a broader significance. An archipelago cannot eliminate distance, but it can ensure that distance does not become intellectual isolation. Young people should be able to encounter the wider world without being taught that opportunity necessarily requires abandoning the islands forever. The more productive lesson is that knowledge can travel in both directions.
The students went to Madrid because of ideas conceived in Azorean educational communities. They will return having seen those ideas against a larger horizon. And perhaps that is one of the most valuable forms of innovation an island society can encourage: teaching its young people that being born surrounded by ocean does not define the boundaries of what they can imagine.
Based on a Press Release – Photo from the Government of the Azores.