The Estratégia 2020 (E2020) Project, promoted by AEDCP, is financed by the Collective Action Support System – Networks and Other forms of partnership and cooperation, from the European Regional Development Fund (FEDER) and under the Operational Program for Competitiveness and Internationalization, Compete2020.

With this project, AEDCP proposes to:

• Develop a 5-year Strategic Plan (2022) and the respective Innovation and Competitiveness Plan that allows to guide and train AEDCP, in order to better understand international trends and define the Cluster’s path for a sustainable growth;
• Promote training activities for companies in the ASD sectors, creating conditions to develop group actions that encourage the training of companies in the sector with an emphasis on SMEs and in order to make them more efficient and competitive in the international market;
• Support companies of the ASD sectors in their effort to promote themselves national and internationally, therefore positioning AEDCP in the international context as a platform that has experience and know-how, allowing them to have more visibility and attract new partners and foreign investment projects, which are the engine of the development of these sectors. In this context, the Cluster should also play the role of facilitating processes for optimizing the production chain of the respective sectors, promoting an increase in the volume of exports;
• Point the way to obtaining the Gold label of Excellence, as a way of consolidating its capacity and integrating the framework of excellence of international clustering, benefiting from a set of procedures that guarantee its effective functioning. Within the scope of this project, until 2020, it is not intended to obtain the Gold Label, which requires a previous period of execution of 4 years and an evaluation phase, but rather to frame the initial steps of this path in the current project in order to make it feasible in 2022;
• Establish an ASD Observatory allowing the permanent monitoring of the evolution of international trends, listening to and prospecting new markets, as Latin America, Africa (continent where Portugal has historical influence) and Asia as the most interesting, but still investing in the regions where these sectors are more developed and in which Portugal already has a presence, such as Brazil, Europe (UK, Spain, France, Germany) and the United States.

As so, the E2020 project is of crucial importance in order for AEDCP to:

1. Promote technological transfer between SI&I and the business world;
2. Boost cooperative capacity;
3. Promote partnerships with national and international entities and Clusters, namely in the promotion of interclusterization activities and in the organization and participation in events;
4. Stimulate job creation in large companies.