Sagunto secures €50,000 from the regional government for its innovation plan
Sagunto City Council has received a €50,000 grant from the Valencian Innovation Agency to launch a strategic framework and a testing space to boost public and private innovation in the municipality.
The municipal proposal, called Innova Sagunt 2026/28: Municipal Strategic Framework and Sandbox for Innovation Cooperation and Transfer, was the top-rated of eleven projects funded in this call by the Valencian Innovation Agency (AVI — Agencia Valenciana de la Innovación). The AVI, part of IVACE+i Innovación (the regional business competitiveness institute), is granting Sagunto €50,000 out of a total budget of €71,428.60; the city council will cover the rest.
The project's main goal is to give the city council a stable structure to support research, development and innovation (R&D&I) — something it lacked in an organised form until now. That structure will rest on two pillars: a Municipal Strategic Framework for Innovation, which will set priorities and a clear governance model, and a Municipal Experimentation Space, known as a Sandbox, where companies and organisations can test solutions before rolling them out more widely.
For residents and businesses in Camp de Morvedre (the district around Sagunto), the initiative means a more direct channel for collaboration between the council, local businesses, universities and other players in the Valencian Innovation System. In a town going through a full shift from traditional steelmaking toward battery manufacturing and electric mobility — with the PowerCo (Volkswagen-owned) gigafactory at its centre — a framework that organises the relationship between the administration and the private sector could help small and medium local businesses, not just the big industrial players, access innovation and knowledge-transfer programmes.
Toni Iborra, the councillor for University, Science and Innovation, said being the top-rated proposal in the call confirms the strength of the work carried out since the department was created three years ago, and explained that the new framework will give Sagunto a roadmap for both driving public innovation policy and boosting local businesses' innovation capacity through the Sandbox.
The call the council applied to is run by the AVI, a body created on 1 February 2017 under regional law 1/2017 with the mission of transforming the Valencian production model toward smarter, more sustainable and socially inclusive economic growth. The agency operates as part of IVACE, the Valencian Institute for Business Competitiveness, a public body that has existed since 10 May 1984, when it was created by regional law 2/1984 to provide financial and technical support to companies on R&D, quality and technology cooperation. The fact that a municipal project from Sagunto scored best among eleven applications from across the Valencian Community shows how much weight the regional administration gives to this kind of local innovation structure.
The project will also identify the territory's main strategic challenges — from the specialised training required by PowerCo's arrival to diversifying the local economy beyond heavy industry — and aims to turn them into concrete opportunities for applied innovation and public-private collaboration. The council has not yet given a precise timeline for launching the Strategic Framework or the Sandbox, though the project is expected to run over 2026-2028.
In practice, a municipal Sandbox like this usually works as a controlled space where a company or organisation can trial a product, a service, or even an administrative procedure before it is applied more broadly, reducing the risk of costly mistakes and shortening the time between an idea and its real-world rollout. For a small or medium business in Camp de Morvedre without its own R&D department, having a space like this in its own municipality, rather than only in Valencia city, could make the difference when it comes to taking the leap into innovation.
For the rest of the district's business community, largely grouped around associations such as ASECAM (the Camp de Morvedre business association), a municipal experimentation space could open an extra channel of collaboration with the council outside the big industrial agreements, at a time when Sagunto is trying to position itself as a reference point for applied innovation within the Valencian Community. According to aytosagunto.es, with additional background from Wikipedia on the Valencian Innovation Agency and IVACE.