For practically four decades Alcino Lavrador has dedicated his energy to the Altice group and built a flourishing career acknowledged within the sector, and also by his colleagues and friends who made a point of honouring him. Until the end of October, he was the director-general of Altice Labs, a company within the group dedicated to researching and developing new solutions for the market. Ana Figueiredo: “I am delighted and proud to announce the Alcino Lavrador Recognition Award to be launched from 2024, which aims to reward the best Master’s and PhD students.”
Altice Portugal’s CEO sees this award as the best way of marking the “unparalleled” path of the person who for the last 15 years headed up the group’s innovation company and who always sought out excellence within the academy as fuel to disrupt the sector. She recalled the vital role played by Lavrador “in bringing the company closer to the academy and to industry,” having promoted “several protocols aimed at recognising merit and the academic, corporate community and attracting talent.”
The finalists in this category include technological solutions in the field of medicine.
Alcino Lavrador kicked off his career at CET – Centro de Estudos de Telecomunicações, in 1985, as the engineer responsible for developing network protocols, and it went from strength to strength. In 1998, he took up a post at PT Inovação as team leader and later, in 2002, he became its director. He also joined the management of PT Inovação Brasil, “where he headed up various projects which significantly transformed the telecommunications sector,” until he took up the post of director-general of Altice Labs. Ana Figueiredo further highlighted “This also allowed MEO to have the leadership we have today in terms of telecommunications in Portugal.”
The vacated post has been filled by Paulo Firmeza, to whom Alcino Lavrador wished “all the best” in this new challenge. Now a consultant, he took the stage and gave thanks “for the recognition by the teams and by the people” with whom he worked over the course of so many years. He continued, “I feel privileged to have had fantastic colleagues, to have had people who always believed in challenges and in doing the impossible and that’s how we manage to do things and make them possible.”
Lasting legacy
The Altice International Innovation Award (AIIA) is also part of the legacy left by the former head. Right from its first edition it has included a range of jury members responsible for evaluating the projects submitted and selecting the winning ideas, as was the case in this seventh edition of the awards. Alcino Lavrador was one of the members of the jury panel who spent the afternoon hearing the pitches by the nine finalists in the three categories – Startup, Inclui and Academy.
The entrepreneurs were allowed individual five-minute sessions to present their ideas to a panel of demanding judges, after which they were grilled for 45 minutes. For the candidates, this was their last chance to convince the jury that they deserved to win their category. Once all the finalists had been heard, the panel of experts decided who would scoop this year’s three main prizes.
