Summer is over. Long is forgotten the murmuring of sea waves while reading at the beach.
We wish you had a great time during the summer break, and that the return to the university, and to work has been smooth. Few things happened before holidays at Tech Factory, that we’d like to update about.
New Location
We moved! Yes, Tech Factory is now a physical space open to spinoffs and startups to use it. We are located at the so-called “Planta Piloto” (pilot plant), a 1950s building used at IQS to teach industrial processes and with a very factory-like feeling to it. Moreover, the building also hosts labs, a large classroom and a couple of our spinoffs: Sagetis, and Hydrokemos.
Tech Factory’s new space includes hot desks, a meeting area that hosts 8 people, a screen for presentations, coffee machine and drinks. This space is open for entrepreneurs, and to-be entrepreneurs, to use it and to organize meetings with their teams, clients and partners. If interested to book and check availability, send us an email to info@www.iqstechfactory.com
Advisory Board
At the end of July we hosted our first Advisory Board meeting. You might be asking yourself: “what is an advisory board, and why we need one?”. An advisory board is a great resource that any startup should have. It’s basically a group of experienced people that agree to regularly meet with your team with the aim to provide strategic advice, and help you push your venture further. In our case, we asked 8 well-recognized professionals to support us in this adventure. Current members of the board include: Federico Abelló (Abisum), José Arcas (Fundación Empresas IQS), Luís Fernandez-Goula (Linqventure), Roberto Gili (Linqventure), Pere Regull (IQS), Juan Roure (IESE), Josep Lluis Sanfeliu (YSIOS), Xavier Viladegut (ICF Capital Expansió FCR). Were are honored that all of them accepted to engage with Tech Factory. During our first meeting, the goals and ambition of Tech Factory were presented, and the board provided valuable advise on how to proceed during these firsts months.
Entrepreneurship Program
We are launching our first entrepreneurship program aimed at students from Universitat Ramon Lull that might have a business idea, or that have an interest in entrepreneurship and want to experience first hand what does it take to create a company. Iniciativa Emprendedora is a 4-week intense program ran together with EOI (Escuela de Organización Industrial) where the methods and tools necessary to take off a business idea are tough and practiced. The program uses a project-based approach, where multidisciplinary teams are built around five business ideas proposed by participants. The program includes items like business modeling, financials, marketing, operations, and intelectual property. Each team has a mentor that supervises the project, and the program ends with a presentation of the business idea.
If you’re a student from Universitat Ramon Llull (i.e. IQS, ESADE, Blanquerna, LaSalle, ESDI, etc.) and have a business idea or want to learn what does it take to find and exploit an opportunity, you might apply for the program here (free of charge).
More Activities
We have lots of activities planned for this year; we’ll have more breakfast, presentations, and meetups. In fact, we already started last week with a session by CDTI about the new NEOTEC program . In this session, some 30 science-based startups met one-to-one with CDTI technicians to solve their doubts about this year’s call.
Our next event is taking place on October 7th, and it’s going to be a presentation entitled “From Knowledge Transfer to Open Innovation: Models and Processes for Tech Transfer” by Elena Canetti. Ms. Canetti is Managing Partner at Invenniam Innovation and she is well-known as one of the most active technology transfer executives within the EMEA, and brings years of experience with technology commercialization in international markets, having completed hundreds of license and research deals to date, in the hi-tech, pharmaceutical and chemicals industries. You can sign up for this event here.
This wraps up our after-summer post. We look forward hearing from you, seeing you at Tech Factory, and meeting you at our events.
