The landscape of startups in Barcelona is still flattering. According to data published by the Barcelona & Catalonia Startup Hub, Catalonia has a total of 1,963 startups today, positioning this region as a very powerful place in terms of its young and entrepreneurial ecosystem.
From January to June 2022, a total of 1,050 million dollars have been invested in Catalan startups. The data also shows the importance of these startups when it comes to figures that cover the entire country: investment during the first quarter of this year alone represented a total of 1,244 million euros invested in startups in Spain.
The student and technological environment make Barcelona an ideal area in which to found a startup, especially if you take into account that 23% of Spanish university students intend to create a company in the next five years, according to the report ‘The entrepreneurial spirit of university students’ by Guess Spain. In addition, the average age of the people who undertake is between 24 and 35 years old and 98% have university studies.
For this reason, initiatives are emerging such as the current alliance reached by TBS Education, through its incubator TBSeeds, and Impactivs with the aim that the latter “support TBS Education with entrepreneurship methodologies, mentor network and learning technologies”as explained by Elie Casamitjana, co-founder and CEO of Impactivs.
It is a union of synergies designed to accompany students in launching their business projects, through a process that aims to provide support from the idea of the startup to financing or marketing strategies, among other stages.
TBSeeds was born a decade ago on the Toulouse campus of TBS Education and now finds its physical location in Barcelona on the new campus of TBS Education – Barcelona, the school with an incubator with space for coworking and meetings. Betting on young entrepreneurship is key in a country that, in addition to having a large number of startups (more than 11,000), has a predominantly young entrepreneur profile, a fact that is explained by the influence of social networks and advances in technology .
This is a generation that, in addition to mastery of digital tools, also has another key characteristic for entrepreneurship: creativity. According to Casamitjana, “Young entrepreneurs have a fresh perspective on the problems that need to be solved in our society and they also come up with innovative solutions.”
Why promote entrepreneurship among young people?
TBS Education-Barcelona exposes some of the reasons why they have made this synergy by and for young entrepreneurship. According to professionals from these two centers, some of the reasons why it is worth betting on young talent are the following:
- Young solutions for new problems: the contact of the new generations with problems that concern them more or touch them more closely, such as the environmental issue, allows this age group to design useful solutions to this situation with more modern resources. This is especially relevant if one takes into account that the current climate situation worries 8 out of 10 young people, according to a study carried out by the SM Foundation.
- talent source: One of the peculiarities that distinguishes this generation from the rest is its digital nativity and its talent for managing digital tools, whose solutions and applications are infinite. This endows this generation, together with the creativity and ideas that characterize it, with a potential entrepreneurial group.
- New horizons in the world of work: the conception of the work of the youngest and the search for flexibility and independence in the field of work are some of the reasons that motivate these young people to undertake. The possibility of not depending on a superior is encouraging for the youngest, who have a self-taught tendency, unlike other generations who have opted more for external training.
