Is innovative entrepreneurship the key to the digital transition? Each day, digital infrastructures play a more significant role in both our private lives and professional environments. That is why the EU launched the Digital Europe Programme earlier this year: to accelerate the digitalization of the region.
The 2021 edition of the Innovation Journey, the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) program on entrepreneurship, follows the key-points of such a digitalization roadmap. Created alongside the RES – EuroCC network, this series of workshops aims at creating innovation by uniting researchers that use High-Performance Computing (HPC) with Small and Medium Enterprises that are on the path of digitalization.
With a total of nineteen participants and seven teams of researchers and businesses, the first of the seven sessions of the Innovation Journey took place on October 1st, both remotely and on the premises of the BSC. The theme of the day: idea validation and prototyping.
As a warm-up, the attendees had the chance to deep dive into the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and the High-Performance Computing. Thanks to Anna Escoda, Technology Transfer Manager at BSC, Oriol Pineda, Infrastructure Access Policy Coordinator at BSC, and Iris Pallarol, Technology Transfer Officer at BSC.
Also, Frederic Dalmau, Partner and Strategy Director at Artefacto Studio, gave a masterclass on design thinking and guided the audience through the keys to validating an idea to transform it into a business prototype.
The program counts with the participation of representatives of BSC-CNS Spin-offs, which, each week, will act as mentors of the innovative projects that are yet to come! For the first session, participants had the chance to know Frontwave’s path as a spin-off, from the idea to a seed round, thanks to Josep de la Puente.
In this sense, the Digital Europe Programme is clear: strategic funding will answer the digitalization challenges that the region has. Plus, the projects supported by it, focus on areas the EU believes are key. Two of them: “supercomputing” and “ensuring a wide use of digital technologies across the economy and society,” which happen to be the primary key points of the Innovation Journey.
Don’t you feel that this trip is just beginning?
