La Salle Campus Barcelona-URL, through its innovation park, La Salle Technova Barcelona, and in collaboration with ACCIÓ -the Agency for Company Competitiveness that is part of the Departament of Business and Knowledge- has today launched the Quick Challenges Resolution in the field of Industry 4.0. The programme is based on solving challenges collaboratively between companies that put forward their problems and start-ups that can provide solutions.
All companies and start-ups will share different workshops and sessions for networking and mentoring over the course of the week at the La Salle-URL Campus in order to put forward new disruptive ideas to the sector and will establish relationships to work together in solving these challenges by carrying out concept tests and possible investment opportunities. Íñigo Pradera, Head of the La Salle-URL Business Service, commented that “this type of programme represents a great opportunity for both companies and start-ups, since corporations get to learn about innovative technologies or solutions and start-ups can find financing and explore new growth possibilities with these corporations”. Pradera also stressed that “this project is different to the usual model in which a corporation receives solutions from several start-ups; in this case there are several corporations from different sectors, which receive possible solutions as part of a specific challenge, allowing everyone involved to contribute their previous experience to others”.
This model substantially enriches the possibilities of pursuing this type of activities, as well as creating stronger synergies between companies that usually would not work together as they belong to different sectors, despite facing similar challenges. This project is one more step forward in La Salle's lengthy experience in Corporate Entrepreneurship programmes relating to the sports industry, logistics or real estate, among others.
La Salle Technova Barcelona has met with the participating companies to set the four common challenges that focus on four areas: Smart Logistics for geolocation, control and tracking of fleets and smart packaging; Smart Production with sensors in the cloud and presentation of data using augmented reality; Smart Data and its analysis and collection to facilitate automation and exchange; Smart Energy & Recycling, to capture and revert heat in production processes. There is also an area for projects that do not fall into any of these categories but which might offer a potential solution to existing or future challenges, or which stands out as offering an innovative project.
From left to right, Xavier Baño, director of innovation at La Salle-URL, Javier de la Ossa, director of La Salle Technova Barcelona, Adrià Leira, Project Manager of Quick Challenges Resolution and Jesús Murillo, Corporate Entrepreneurship Manager of Acció
The 9 leading companies in the programme are Schneider Electric, a main player in energy management and a leader in the digital transformation of energy management and automation; NovartisPharmaceuticals, which uses innovative scientific and digital technologies for healthcare; Celsa Group, Spain’s largest steel company and Europe's second largest producer of long steel products; Semillas Fitó, one of the largest multinationals in the field of genetic improvement and the production and distribution of seeds; Ecoembes, a non-profit company dedicated to selective collection and recovery of packaging waste for treatment and recycling; Serunion, a collective catering company with more than 30 years of experience in the sector and a leader in its market; Mercabarna, the company managing the fresh food wholesale markets in Barcelona and the group of more than 700 companies specialising in food located within its facilities; Encofrats Alsina, dedicated to the sale and rental of concrete formwork systems; and Idilia Foods, a Spanish multinational focused on offering high quality products for breakfast and snacks for the whole family, such as popular products Cola Cao and Nocilla.
The 10 start-ups were selected through a national and international call, and include the following names: Zolertia, dedicated to the monitoring of production cells in industrial plants; ChainGO Tech, a web platform based on Blockchain technology for the management, certification and validation of the flow of information and documentation in logistics; Wear Health, a workers' safety system, capable of detecting falls and performing risk assessment of different jobs; Flythings, an open IoT platform whose purpose is to capture data from different sources and explore the invisible value of the data by applying the latest AI and ML techniques; Stockare, automatic logging of measuring equipment and warehouse tools with RFID technology, geolocation and tracking of equipment using Sigfox technology; DiagSense, predictive maintenance solutions for mechanical systems and pipelines, using artificial intelligence and statistical data mining; IoTium, which tackles the complexity of implementation and security vulnerabilities associated with large-scale IoT implementations using its direct delivery infrastructure; WiTraC, a real-time wireless location and tracking system (RTLS), based on the Internet of Things (IoT) and intelligent sensors; Energyly, offering real-time energy monitoring to provide energy efficiency to small and medium enterprises to cut energy costs using energy analysis; and Nexiona, which works on the privacy and ownership of IoT data in industrial processes, industrial property protection and intellectual property in industry 4.0.
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