26 September 2023

Fundación LAB Mediterráneo outlines its actions after 3 years of existence

Valencia, 4 September 2023.- Fundación LAB Mediterráneo, a project promoted by the Employers’ Association of Valencia (AVE), presents Live LAB, an informative meeting to inform the media of all the advances and actions taking place from the Foundation, in which Héctor Dominguis, president of Fundación LAB Mediterráneo and Enrique Soto, Director of Fundación LAB Mediterráneo participated.

The meeting was the first contact between the new president and director of the Foundation with the media, at which the initiatives being carried out as well as future actions were explained.

The Foundation has the following objectives: (I) foment the creation and attraction of technological startups, (II) encourage technology companies to set up in the Valencian Community and create a ‘pull effect’, (III) promote the support for companies in non-technology sectors in the Community to help speed up their digital transformation , and (IV) contribute to helping increase private investment in innovation and R&D and (V) help foment research.

In order to fulfil the aforesaid, Fundación LAB Mediterráneo is carrying out different measures relating to communication, dissemination, knowledge generation and support for existing initiatives in the Valencian Community which are linked to their areas of activity.

In the case of the area of communication, the “#YoSI” movement was created, which connects with the idea of an Unlimited Company (UC) promoted by the Foundation and aims at giving visibility to the talent of the people who promote progress and stand out in any of these four lines. To help advance the movement, in May of this year, we set up a large urn in Valencia, Alicante and Castelló in which citizens could express, with their “vote”, their opinion on the future of the Valencian Community, and the role to be played, in said future, by entrepreneurship, innovation, technology and research.

The Foundation’s president, Héctor Dominguis, said “we open this debate in order to call on political parties to include in their priorities a medium to long term vision of the Community, rather than thinking in the short term, and one that includes these four lines of action as strategies”.

With regard to the area of dissemination, several actions are carried out. On the one hand, the outreach sessions, seminars with experts related to the foundation’s four lines of action concerning the following themes: Startups and large corporations, Open innovation, Digital transformation, Cybersecurity, Data and artificial intelligence, Industrial digitalization, Good practices between Spain and Israel, Cryptocurrencies, among others.

On the other hand are the specific measures with collectives on which the Foundation focuses its activity, such as:

Researchers: the Connecting Businesspeople and Researchers meeting at which the latter present the lines of research on which they are working and which are of interest to the former, generating opportunities to collaborate on business projects. With an aim to help train the researchers taking part in the meeting, they are offered a business management course at EDEM Escuela de Empresarios.
Students: Challenges with university students, with the main idea that participants put forward innovative solutions to real business problems and get to know the business world.
Startups: Connecting large corporations and startups, meetings at which large corporations and startups are afforded the opportunity to get to know one another and promote open innovation projects.
SMEs: Mentoring for SMEs, mentoring seminars, to help overcome the innovation and technology challenges faced by the SMEs in the Valencian Community. The Mentoring’s second edition will take place on 14 September in Castelló. According to Héctor Dominguis “the objective is to help the SMEs grow because small businesses need to grow so as to be big enough to allow investment in R&D&I. The businesspeople taking part in the mentoring are given the opportunity to take the SuperPymes course, by EDEM, to help train them by providing them with knowledge in the main areas of business management.

And, lastly, business missions to get to know good practices and obtain learning outcomes from the regions that are a reference in the Foundation’s areas. The next one, Silicon Valley, from 4 to 9 November.

The reports drawn by the Foundation are within the framework of the area of knowledge generation. After publishing two reports on R&D and Innovation, How to foment R&D&I in the Valencian Community and an in-depth analysis of Private Investment in R&D&I in the Valencian Community, this year, a third document has been released, Technology as a growth engine, which analyses the role of technology as a basis for economic and social progress and compares the situation in the Valencian Community with the most developed countries in Europe and the leading regions in Spain: Community of Madrid, Catalonia and Basque Country. The different documents were drawn up by researchers at the Valencian Institute for Economic Research (Ivie).

We have likewise collaborated with the Miguel Hernández University (UMH) on the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) report, which gives an overview of the current state of entrepreneurial activity in the Valencian Community.

The last area is support for existing initiatives making us a reference in one or several of the Foundation’s four lines of action, such as Blue Ventures, Club for Innovation in the Valencian Community (CiCV), RAQRS International Symposium, CTO Summit, FTalks Food Summit, IV International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence, The Next Web, Startups Investors Connect (Sabadell Bstartup) and the Valencia Digital Summit, among others.

Fundación LAB Mediterráneo

Fundación LAB Mediterráneo is a project created by AVE with the mission of positioning the Region of Valencia as a national and European benchmark in entrepreneurship, innovation, technology and research.

To achieve this, it has set itself five objectives: to promote the creation and attraction of technology start-ups; to work to attract national and international technology companies to set up in the Valencia Region and create a ‘tractor effect’; to promote support for companies in non-technological sectors to accelerate their digital transformation; to contribute to increasing private investment in R&D&I; and to help promote research.

The Foundation’s Board of Trustees is made up of the following entities Aceitunas Cazorla, Aquaservice/Plug and Play, AVE, Baleària, Banco Sabadell, Boluda Corporación Marítima, CaixaBank, Dacsa Group, Embutidos Martínez/KMZERO , GDES, Grupo AZA, Grupo Bertolín, Grupo Gimeno, Helados Estiu, Importaco, Lanzadera, Logifruit, Nunsys , Royo/ Invext, S2 Grupo, SPB/Cleanity TIBA/Romeu, Verne Technology Group y Zeus/Sesame.