Abstract
When the COVID-19 pandemic hits Portugal in early March 2020, medical doctors, engineers and researchers, with the encouragement of the Northern Region Health Administration, teamed up to develop and build, locally and in a short time, a ventilator that might eventually be used in extreme emergency situations in the hospitals of northern Portugal. This letter tells you the story of Pneuma, a low-cost emergency ventilator designed and built under harsh isolation constraints, that gave birth to derivative designs in Brazil and Morocco, has been industrialized with 200 units being produced, and is now looking forward to the certification as a medical device that will possibly support a go-tomarket launch. Open intellectual property (IP), multi disciplinarity teamwork, fast prototyping and product engineering have shortened to a few months an otherwise quite longer idea-to-product route, clearly demonstrating that when scientific and engineering knowledge hold hands great challenges can be successfully faced.

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Manufacturing management requires increasing software and systems support for reactive decision making and optimised control of relevant performance parameters for improved competitiveness. This paper introduces and develops a novel concept, which is based on the use of a toolbox-based approach to the construction of manufacturing management solutions. Although this concept can be generally applied when implementing planning, scheduling and manufacturing control systems, the emphasis here is being put in the so-called shop-floor area. The first pilot implementation at a shoe manufacturing company is able to demonstration both the effectiveness and the still unexploited potential of the Process Condition Monitoring (PCM) concepts and tools.

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This paper is meant to share some views on the relevance of science and R&D to business development and to sustainable economic growth. While attempting to do this, it is also meant to present some insight to an encompassing and complex reality with a multitude of interacting actors with different values, motivations, time-frames, cultures and even language: scientists, technologists, entrepreneurs, brokers, investors, politicians, etc. In this paper, knowledge is first discussed as the competitive advantage of our time. Then, the "knowledge-to-competitiveness" value chain is presented and discussed. Being innovation a key concept, the various types of innovation are discussed and the use of some major innovation management tools is briefly introduced. The business perspective is then put forward, discussing the complex mechanics of knowledge management scoring, due-diligence and rationale supporting investment decisions in novel science-based companies.

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Innovation projects could be considered successful if they lead to novel products, processes, or services, with positive impact on the market. INESC Porto, in partnership with the Science and Higher Education Observatory (OCES) of the Portuguese Ministry of Science and Higher Education (MCES) is undertaking a research project aiming to characterize and analyze the Innovation process, and to identify the critical success factors, in terms of consortium structure and management. The paper describes the work undertaken so far, with a special focus on the impact of the human factor for the success of strategic cooperation networks and alliances for innovation.