After 10 years of activity as entrepreneurial project incubatorCIEM Zaragoza begins a new period as innovation factory. This evolution, gestated through the progressive expansion of its programs for startups in recent years, thus concludes with the transformation of the entity to focus its activity on the creation of a large open innovation ecosystem promoted from Zaragoza.
The objective of this strategic change is to provide the public-private entity, promoted by the Zaragoza City Council and managed by Grupo Init, with a new framework to develop a space for collaboration and joint innovationin which mature companies, startups and educational institutions coexist to create business opportunities with a positive impact.
In this way, the entity follows a model successfully implemented in different European countries to create open innovation ecosystems, which in the case of CIEM Zaragoza will be made up of technology-based entrepreneurs specialized in health, industry and retail; consolidated innovative companies; innovative educational entities; investor capital and financing entities focused on the development of open innovation; research entities, such as universities, business schools and technology centers; and civil society organized in foundations, with a clear commitment to social and business innovation.
Along with this role as a catalyst for collaborative projects, sustainability will continue to be one of the differential values of CIEM Zaragoza in its new stage, in which initiatives with a positive social and environmental impact. This decision will continue the organization’s commitment to sustainable entrepreneurship, after becoming the first incubator-accelerator in Spain to develop an acceleration program to create and promote companies, startups or entrepreneurial projects linked to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) of the ONU.
eleven years of evolution
“CIEM Zaragoza has not stopped evolving in these 11 years of existence. An innovative center cannot remain stuck on its past successes. The conversion into an Innovation Factory responds to the opportunity that open innovation models offer not only to startups, but also to mature companies, educational entities and research centers. It is about thinking in terms of virtuous circles, basting and directing all the agents towards a challenge of creating prosperity. This reality is closely linked to the creation of urban ecosystems of innovation and prosperity creation in the terms described by the economist Kate Raworth in her work ‘The Donut Economy’ ”explains Romy Piñeyroa, manager of CIEM Zaragoza.
In this line, the Minister of Economy, Innovation and Employment of the Zaragoza City Council, Carmen Herrarte, highlighted the good harmony that exists between the city council and CIEM Zaragoza from the first moment the joint work began: “We believe in the new economy and in human talent, the true foundation of the companies that are housed here. Here there are mature companies, start-up companies, civil society, innovative educational entities… There is the perfect ecosystem to continue promoting digitization, the new economy and, above all, innovation, while continuing to position the city of Zaragoza outward”.
The transformation of the entity occurs in parallel to the development of its new programs and events of open innovation, such as the first edition of the Aragón eHealth Open Innovation Summit, created to promote innovation in digital health and create a new meeting point for the social and healthcare sector throughout the Ebro Valley. Likewise, other initiatives with a longer history in the time, as Horizonte Factoría, the first industrial open innovation laboratory in Spain, will continue to develop in this new stage, contributing the entire wealth of knowledge and companies that have already participated in previous editions.
