Five Nations, One Mission
How ENRICH in LAC Is Rewiring Innovation Between Two Continents
From the rainforests of Brazil to the solar deserts of Chile, a European-backed network is quietly transforming what it means to innovate across the Atlantic.
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There is a moment in every great partnership when paperwork becomes purpose — when a signed agreement stops being an administrative act and starts becoming a community, a laboratory, a livelihood. For ENRICH in LAC, the European Network of Research and Innovation Centres and Hubs in Latin America and the Caribbean, that moment has been unfolding country by country, sector by sector, across five remarkable nations: Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, and Uruguay.
Backed by the European Commission through Horizon 2020 — and now expanding under a wider mandate — ENRICH in LAC is more than a networking initiative. It is an infrastructure for the future: connecting startups in Medellín with investors in Madrid, pairing researchers in Porto Alegre with labs in Lisbon, and giving a Montevideo cleantech firm a soft landing in Vienna. It is unglamorous, relentless, necessary work — and it is working.
The Five Pillars: Who the Partner Nations Are
ENRICH in LAC’s core LAC partner countries were chosen with precision. According to the project’s founding CORDIS documentation, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, and Uruguay were selected due to their membership within the MERCOSUR trade bloc and their strong positioning on the Global Innovation Index. Each brings something distinct to the table.
Brazil is the anchor — the country where ENRICH was born, through the CEBRABIC project, and where its São Paulo headquarters are based. It is Latin America’s largest economy and, under Horizon 2020, the region’s most active participant in EU-funded research. Brazil ranked sixth among the most active non-EU countries worldwide in Horizon 2020 participation — and first in the entire LAC region. It is a country of profound scientific ambition, with research institutions like EMBRAPA, FAPESP, and UFRJ forming a constellation of knowledge that Europe increasingly wants to work with.
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Argentina contributes a tradition of rigorous academic research and a growing startup culture. Two Argentine researchers were awarded ERC Consolidator Grants in 2022 alone — a signal of the talent the country is producing and the potential for deeper EU-LAC collaboration in frontier science.
Chile is the region’s green energy pioneer. Having built the world’s largest electric bus fleet outside China and rapidly advancing its green hydrogen programme, Chile is not merely adapting to the clean energy transition — it is leading it. Its combination of exceptional renewable resources (the Atacama Desert is one of the world’s premier solar sites), smart regulation, and innovative financing has made it a magnet for European climate-tech partnerships.
Colombia brings the dynamism of its innovation cities — Medellín and Bogotá — where vibrant accelerator ecosystems, a young entrepreneurial population, and growing national investment in science and technology have created fertile ground for international collaboration. Softlanding hubs like Créame in Medellín and ConnectBogotá are active ENRICH in LAC partners, opening doors for European companies to enter one of South America’s fastest-growing markets.
Uruguay, though the smallest of the five by population, punches far above its weight. It has transformed its national energy mix in under two decades, now generating 98% of its electricity from renewable sources — a global benchmark. UTEC, the Universidad Tecnológica del Uruguay, is an active ENRICH softlanding hub, while the country’s stable institutions and forward-looking regulatory environment make it a natural entry point for European innovators into the Southern Cone.
The European Entrepreneur Expedition: Taking the Leap
One of ENRICH in LAC’s most celebrated programmes is the European Entrepreneur Expedition — a structured immersion experience that invites Latin American entrepreneurs to travel to Europe, visit innovation hubs, and forge the kind of partnerships that simply cannot be created over a video call.
The December 2023 edition brought a cohort of LAC entrepreneurs to Portugal, visiting institutions including IRIS Lionesa Business Hub, CEiiA (the Centre of Engineering and Product Development), and UPTEC (Porto’s science and technology park). Participants came from the network’s core focus industries: ICT and digitalisation, renewable energy, sustainable urbanisation, and bioeconomy — the four pillars around which ENRICH in LAC has organised its thematic work.
The expedition is not a junket. It is a knowledge exchange with concrete outcomes: new commercial partnerships, technology transfer agreements, and co-development projects that span two continents. For a startup founder from Bogotá or a researcher from Porto Alegre, spending three days embedded in one of Europe’s leading innovation ecosystems can be the difference between a local venture and a global company.
The Brazil–Germany Tech Challenge: Bridges Across the Atlantic
If the Entrepreneur Expedition sends Latin Americans to Europe, the Brazil–Germany Tech Challenge brings the conversation back across the Atlantic. This bilateral innovation challenge, facilitated by ENRICH in LAC, brought together public and private sector players from both countries to identify bridges and synergies between their innovation systems.
The timing was strategic. Germany is Brazil’s largest European trading partner and a country with deep industrial expertise in areas — renewable energy technology, precision manufacturing, digital infrastructure — where Brazil is rapidly scaling. The challenge created a structured arena for this complementarity: matching Brazilian startups with German industrial partners, pairing research teams with market needs, and generating joint roadmaps in sectors from AgTech to cleantech.
This kind of bilateral focus is central to ENRICH in LAC’s philosophy. Rather than treating the LAC region as a monolith, the network recognises that each country has a distinct innovation profile — and that the most valuable partnerships are those built on genuine complementarity rather than proximity alone.
The Twinning Programme: Pairing Ecosystems, Not Just Companies
Perhaps the most structurally ambitious of ENRICH in LAC’s programmes is the Twinning Programme, designed to create lasting institutional bonds between innovation ecosystems in Europe and Latin America. The programme connects incubators, accelerators, and science parks on both sides of the Atlantic in sustained, peer-to-peer relationships — not one-off meetings, but ongoing exchanges of methodology, staff, and strategy.
The concept proof was delivered successfully, demonstrating that the model works: European innovation organisations can genuinely learn from their LAC counterparts, and vice versa. A science park in southern Brazil wrestling with how to attract international talent has something to learn from — and teach — a technology hub in Lisbon or Graz. The Twinning Programme creates the conditions for that learning to happen.
At the Madrid gathering in June 2025, the network’s second major in-person meeting brought together more than 35 incubators and accelerators from Europe and Latin America and the Caribbean. New members including Universidad de Costa Rica, USIL Ventures from Peru, and IMPAQTO from Ecuador joined existing partners. The gathering produced bilateral agreements, joint roadmaps, and preparations for upcoming immersion weeks and climate-focused ideation programmes — expanding ENRICH in LAC’s reach well beyond its original five founding nations.
The Outreach Grants: Capital for Connections
Not every path to partnership runs through an expedition or a twinning programme. Sometimes what a research-driven SME needs is simply enough funding to make the first contact — to attend the right conference, commission the right translation, or hire the right local advisor. ENRICH in LAC’s Outreach Grants programme was designed precisely for this.
Launched in 2022 with two consecutive calls, the programme awarded grants to European and LAC research-driven SMEs to connect their respective markets and explore cooperation opportunities. The success stories are instructive: one recipient, Aila Raquel, described how the grant enabled her to build a cross-border partnership that would otherwise have taken years to develop organically. The grant did not fund a project — it funded a relationship.
Why This Matters: The €45 Billion Moment
The work of ENRICH in LAC does not happen in isolation. It sits within a much larger strategic frame: the EU’s Global Gateway Investment Agenda for Latin America and the Caribbean, through which Europe has committed to investing over €45 billion to support its partnership with the region. This is not development aid in the old sense — it is strategic investment in shared infrastructure, shared science, and shared prosperity.
The EU is already the leading foreign investor in the LAC region, with Foreign Direct Investment stocks of around €741 billion — roughly equal to EU investment in China, India, Japan, and Russia combined. EU investments support an estimated 2.75 million jobs across the LAC region. And yet, LAC still receives only 5% of privately financed global clean energy investment, while carrying 75% of the world’s climate risk. Closing that gap is not just a moral imperative. For Europe, it is a strategic one.
ENRICH in LAC is the connective tissue of that larger ambition. Its softlanding hubs in São Paulo, Montevideo, Medellín, Santiago, and Buenos Aires are the entry points through which European innovation flows into Latin American markets — and through which Latin American ingenuity flows into European research consortia. The Memoranda of Understanding signed under its auspices, including those linking the network to Rio de Janeiro’s growing climate innovation ecosystem, are the formal expressions of something that has been building informally for years: a shared conviction that the most important problems of the 21st century — climate, health, food, digital transformation — will only be solved if the world’s most dynamic innovation regions work together.
About ENRICH in LAC
ENRICH in LAC is the European Network of Research and Innovation Centres and Hubs in Latin America and the Caribbean, headquartered in São Paulo, Brazil. It receives funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101004572. For more information: enrichinlac.eu