From physical tracks to digital tracks - The Vale dos Trilhos by Tônia Mansani and Silvestre Labiak Junior

For more than a century, the rails that cut Ponta Grossa told a story of connection: they were the ones that connected the city to the coast, to the interior, to the markets, turning a railway junction into the economic pole of the Campos Gerais. The Saudade Station is the physical symbol of this vocation, a place where people, goods and, above all, opportunities passed by. The previous chapters of this work have covered the Ponta Grossa that grows in concrete, asphalt and infrastructure: paved streets, expanded sanitation, rethought urban mobility. This chapter proposes a change of perspective. If the larger city is also built with tracks, bridges and roads, it projects itself into the future through another type of infrastructure, less visible but equally decisive: the infrastructure of knowledge, technology and innovation.

It is not a break, it is a continuity. The same tracks that united Ponta Grossa to the world in the nineteenth century make sense again, now as a metaphor and as a brand: the Valley of the Rails, an innovation ecosystem that the city has been building in recent years, inherits the name of the railway vocation to describe a new network of connections, between actors of government, knowledge, development, habitats, institutional, business. From physical tracks to digital tracks, the path is the same: joining distant points and circulating what moves development. They used to be cargo and passengers. Now it's ideas, data, knowledge and business.

The Innovation Agency as the engine of the local ecosystem

Every sustainable transformation needs an institution that organizes it, and that was a deliberate choice of the municipal management. Prior to 2021, innovation initiatives. Entrepreneurship and development that occurred in a dispersed way throughout the city in universities, in business associations, in one-off projects that were born and died with each management. It lacked a single vector, with budget, technical staff and continuity capable of surviving changes of conjuncture. It was to fill this gap that the municipal administration decided to create the Innovation and Development Agency, instituted by Lei Municipal no 14.117, of December 1, 2021, a milestone that placed innovation on the same level of strategic priority historically reserved for areas such as health, education and infrastructure.

The creation of the Agency was not a symbolic gesture: it was a governance decision that redesigned the way the executive power treats economic development. By instituting a body dedicated exclusively to this theme, the management has assumed the commitment to treat innovation as a municipal state policy, and not as an occasional initiative. The Agency was tasked with formulating, implementing and monitoring municipal public policies of sustainable development, innovation, entrepreneurship and the qualification of public services, a broad mandate that required the political will of the administration to concentrate resources, articulate secretariats and sustain the project year after year, even when the results were not yet visible.

In practice, this meant assuming a function of permanent articulation between the City Hall and the other actors of the ecosystem, with the mission of attracting new investments and consolidating the existing ones, whenever they contribute strategically to the desenvolvimento socioeconômico of the municipality. It is a model of public management that compares to the innovation and development agencies present in reference cities in the country, but built to measure for the reality and potential of Campos Gerais.

The results began to appear consistently. In a few years, Ponta Grossa has become nationally and internationally recognized for its structured policy of innovation. The city was selected for the fourth time in a row among the Smart21 Communities of the Year, ranking of the Intelligent Community Forum (ICF) that recognizes the 21 smartest communities in the world, being, alongside Assaí and Londrina, the only representatives of Latin America on the most recent list. In 2025, the municipality also won the Selo Ouro of the Connected Smart Cities Award in the category of Innovation Ecosystems, recognition that places it among the Brazilian cities that most advance in innovation, digital transformation and sustainable development. And, in the 2024 Accreditation of Innovation Promoting Environments, Ponta Grossa took the lead of the Paraná, with 64 accredited environments, including innovation centers, hubs, incubators and pre-incubators.

These recognitions are not just stamps for institutional showcases. They translate, in the language of international rankings, something that the entrepreneurs and researchers of the city already felt in the day to day: Ponta Grossa stopped treating innovation as discourse and began to treat it as municipal state policy, with law, budget, structure and continuity.

Ecosystem of startups

If the Innovation Agency is the engine, the ecosystem is where this engine produces its most visible effects on the local economy. One of the symbols that materializes this change is the Hub Station, inaugurated on June 5, 2025 in the building of the old Art Station, a building from 1896 that is a historical heritage of the city. The choice of the place was not only symbolic: where trains used to pass, today there is a laboratory of ideas, a podcast studio, meeting rooms, training spaces for startups and an arena for hackathons, a meeting point for all the actors of the city’s innovation ecosystem.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the Hub Station is, architecturally, the exact materialization of the title of this chapter: a building erected for the physical tracks of the nineteenth century, requalified to house the digital tracks of the twenty-first century. The same vocation to connect distant places, once fulfilled by locomotives, is now fulfilled by startups, mentoring networks, training programs and public innovation policies.

Technology connecting companies and society

An innovation ecosystem can only be sustained when technology ceases to be a niche subject and becomes part of city life in schools, in neighborhoods, in the daily lives of people who may never open a startup, but who are, nevertheless, direct beneficiaries of this movement. Ponta Grossa has invested in this wider dimension through Creative Learning Laboratories (LAC), spaces deployed in schools of the municipal network so that children and adolescents work innovation, technology and creativity from an early age. There are already more than 50 laboratories in operation, which makes educação básica one of the least obvious, but more strategic, pillars of the city’s innovation ecosystem: this is where the entrepreneurs, researchers and technology professionals of the next decade are trained.

This is the deepest sense of the transition that gives this chapter its title. Physical infrastructure, tracks, roads, refurbished historic buildings remain a necessary condition for development. But it's no longer enough. The real competitive differential of a city like Ponta Grossa, in the 21st century, is the ability to connect this physical base to an infrastructure of knowledge, data and relationships that continuously generates value and that, unlike concrete, multiplies the more it is shared.

Rail Valley: the new innovation pole of Ponta Grossa

All these elements, the Innovation Agency, the startup ecosystem, the technology at the service of society, converge on the same project: the Valley of the Rails, a public policy brand agreed in 2021 and instituted by lei municipal to identify and organize the innovation ecosystem of Ponta Grossa. More than a name, Vale dos Trilhos is an institutional architecture that connects the actors of the innovation ecosystem in a cooperative environment aimed at generating new ideas, projects and businesses, guided by six guiding axes: participatory community and democratic management; technological democratization and digital inclusion; education and entrepreneurship; promotion and development; integration and cooperation; and simplification and debureaucratization.

The recognition that the city has been receiving, the Selo Ouro of Innovation Ecosystems, the recurring permanence among the Smart21 Communities, the state leadership in accredited innovation environments, is not the point of arrival, but evidence that Ponta Grossa is on the right track. The Valley of the Rails consolidates itself as the new pole of innovation of the city precisely because it is not limited to attracting technology companies: it reorganizes the way the city thinks its own development, uniting historical heritage, human capital formed locally and an institutionality that survives changes of conjuncture.

If the first part of this work showed the Ponta Grossa that becomes larger in territory, population and infrastructure, this chapter showed the other half of this equation: a city that also grows in ability to generate, retain and share knowledge. The tracks that once brought progress by the force of steel and steam continue to fulfill their function, now driven by data, ideas and the energy of those who undertake. And it is on this same trail, from the route of the tropeiros to the tracks of innovation, that Ponta Grossa continues to build its future.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sElC4XZW-xs

Article by Tônia Mansani and Silvestre Labiak Junior for the book: "PONTA GROSSA: From the Route of the Tropeiros to the Tracks of Innovation"

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