CEVT holds innovation incubator session in Barcelona

What happens when you sit down for 48 hours with 27 entrepreneurs who never met before? Let's find out. Last week our innovation team took CEVT to Barcelona for an incubation session with high-tech start-ups to find new ideas. Here are five quick questions with Leif Axelsson, Innovation Strategy Director at CEVT, to learn more.

Why were you in Barcelona?

We need to continuously explore and learn about new and more effective ways to develop new technologies, new products and services. From experience we have learned that we need to focus more on individuals to establish speed and progress in driving innovation. The session in Barcelona provided an interesting methodology for targeting individuals and create teams based upon personal profiling, which we found interesting to learn more about. We also found it exciting to learn what could be achieved in 48 hours, with people who never have met before, facing a business challenge they have never been working with before. There are several interesting learnings to draw from that process.

So what did you do in Barcelona?

Based on previous tech-scouting we have found out that thereis fiercecompetition amongst OEM's for high-tech start-ups. We also found that companies we met often are established small companies with international expansion ambitions rather than start-up's. To attract these companies we need to be very quick. As a consequence we explore ways to get to the start-ups earlier, before they are too established.

In our planning for next event to find start-ups, InnoScout, in Barcelona in October, we came across an interesting start-up concept, run by a local incubator, Demium. Demium runs incubators in Valencia, Madrid, Barcelona, Bilbao and Málaga. Their focus is to create start-ups from scratch by connecting the best business opportunities with the best entrepreneurs. In short they invite entrepreneurs and, based on their personal profiles, are grouped into high performing teams. The teams are provided with business challenges and from that challenge they create ideas and develop concepts, which they present to a jury within 48 hours. The jury ranks the concepts and establish a new company based on the team and the concept.

In the 34th event, AllStartup#34, CEVT provided business challenges based on our innovation strategy, with the goal that at least one of the start-ups will develop a solution that we would like to collaborate with. Our ambition is to have these selected start-ups presenting their concepts at our InnoScout event in Barcelona in October.

Who did you meet?

We met 27 skilled, driven, eager and ambitious entrepreneurs.

Did the event meet your expectations?

Yes, it did! We learned a lot about a well-functioning process and ways of efficiently creating teams with a lot of energy.

Where are you going next?

We will go back to Barcelona the 9th of October to organize our second InnoScout event, where we invite about 15 innovative start-ups to present their companies and solutions to a jury with broad representation from CEVT, Geely Design and Lynk & Co.