Espaitec, the Science and Technology Park of the Universitat Jaume I, held the first online session of the Innovatossals 2020 Event (Innovating with Tombatossals), which forms part of the business growth Castellón Global Program co-financed by the Castellón Council Offices.
While opening Innovatossals, the Rector of the Universitat Jaume I (UJI), Eva Alcón, stressed the importance of sharing spaces to reflect with the production fabric in order to allow «to share companies’ innovation strategies with considerable international scope that represent strategic sectors».
Alcón argued that «this is a key matter for universities like the UJI» and underlined that, as a public university in Castellón, the UJI is opting «to promote the processes of knowledge transfer generated on our campus to convert it into a central element of business competitiveness and social transformation».
The provincial representative of Economic Promotion, Occupation and Internationalisation, Pau Ferrando, highlighted that «technology-based companies play a leading role in transferring knowledge about technological innovation to the production fabric in order to generate highly qualified job posts and to revitalise the economy from a local to a global scale».
The first Innovatossals session began with José Ramón García from the firm BSH España, who shared its fruitful relationship with the Universidad de Zaragoza in the industrial PhDs area. He stressed the keys that have made it possible for this positive relationship to continue with time: the team, having shared objectives, psychological assurance and collective intelligence.
Next José Insenser, from Airbus, stressed the innovation processes that the company has followed to date, starting with the conception, incubation, acceleration, and finally the transition, phases to achieve innovation, understood as a tangible value and a future product. Each phase lasts an estimated time of between 6 and 12 months, and obtaining results is self-demanded from the incubation phase.
The next speaker was Mikel Díez from IBM, who indicated that this company undertakes applied innovation in every country. This firm has 140,000 patents, and owns 19 laboratories in five continents used to follow innovation processes. Díez highlighted that the key to innovate lies in creating an innovation ecosystem in which the relationship with start-ups can generate relevant synergies.
The event continued with the turn of José Luis López from the firm Talgo, who was “Inventor of the Year” in 2013. López summarised the beginning of the firm Talgo with innovation processes from 1950 to the present-day. He emphasised that innovation was promoted by the firm’s founders. With time, major goals were accomplished, such as becoming the first railway company to incorporate the automatic track width change into the railway line between Barcelona and Geneva.
Luis Ignacio Olmo, from the company Asti Mobile Robotics, emphasised the innovation that a SME from Burgos (Spain) had carried out. Its innovation processes are based on four concepts, the 4Ps: people, processes, patents, passion. They have led this firm to be considered, among other achievements, “the best SME in Spain” in 2018. He also stressed that business innovation focuses on being able to transfer this previous effort to the market.
