Mar Martínez, Beatriz Camacho (IESE Business School) and Miguel Rodríguez (Tecnalia) represented the EU-LAC Digital Accelerator at the Science 4 Industry (S4i) event held in Madrid (Spain) on 29-30 January 2025.
Startups and spin-offs from universities connect with industrial partners to test their solutions in real environments and with financial partners to help their companies grow.
Mar and Beatriz hence managed to have 1-1 meetings with corporations such as Grupo Celsa and with companies from the energy and food sectors interested in joining the EU-LAC open innovation initiatives.
In parallel, Miguel participated in an Industry Pitch through which he gained detailed insight into the open innovation priorities of companies such as Talgo (train design and manufacturing), Pascual (dairy), Alsa (bus transportation services), and Repsol (oil and gas).
As a consequence, the team identified relevant corporate challenges and analysed promising startups as part of the project’s deal flow.
The EU-LAC team also took the opportunity to explore their interest in Latin American ecosystems.
Eventually, they also interacted with the scientific-entrepreneurial ecosystem, focusing on understanding proposals from startups in the health sector as the EU-LAC Accelerator will soon open a HealthTech opportunity area with specific corporate challenges in this field.
