The Innovation Journey wrap-up.
How can institutions and industry finally mind the gap in between each other? How can we effectively transfer to society the amount of knowledge that research creates? Or even, how can the potential of our infrastructure reach industry virtually? These questions are not a surprise for anyone anymore. However, this time it seems that answers are beginning to come our way.
We are witnesses to the need for a systemic change that allows efficient feedback to those questions. Also, considering the cutting-edge knowledge that the BSC produces per year: we can only think of ourselves as an essential element in the value chain that science can offer to society. In this sense, on November 12th, our programme for entrepreneurship and innovation came to an end after seven weeks.
The Innovation Journey, organised jointly with the EuroCC Spain RES initiative, shows the compromise of the BSC with the impact that the technological advances reached within the Center can have on the ecosystem as a whole. It is no coincidence that 24 different keynote speakers –public and private actors, experts, and entrepreneurs- participated in a seven-week programme. They did so together with 7 of our own Spin-off companies and addressed an audience of 19 scientists and SMEs of 7 different nationalities.
The end of the program comes with great expectations for the transfer of innovation at BSC: potential Spin-off creation opportunities are arising, and possible alliances of SMEs with our supercomputing infrastructure, are underway. The complete success of an entrepreneurship programme like this, nevertheless, can only happen with an institutional compromise towards encouraging a full societal impact on a day-to-day basis.
On one side, access of the industry to digitalization is one of the main policy pillars of the European Initiatives for the Digital Decade. On the other side, Deep Tech start-ups emerging from scientific institutions, are recently finding their well-deserved prominence in Barcelona with the recently introduced scientific and institutional alliance: the Deep Tech Node. With all of this happening simultaneously, maybe we are starting to find the answers to the eternal questions. Are we finally experiencing a cultural change?
