Barcelona is "iCapital" of Europe (European Commission) 

Europe’s premier innovation event, the Innovation Convention 2014, took place in Brussels on March 11.   The European Commission has awarded the European Capital of Innovation (“iCapital”) to Barcelona (Spain).   The winner of the iCapital award was announced during the convention; Barcelona was awarded the prize of 500000 Euros. This amount will be used to scale up and expand Barcelona's efforts on innovation. Barcelona was chosen by a panel of independent experts in a close competition with Grenoble (France) and Groningen (The Netherlands). The judges chose Barcelona thanks to its dedication and efforts to promote innovation and improving the quality of their citizen’s lives. Innovation is central to economic growth and business competitiveness, and is at the heart of the EU's 2020 strategy.
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Coupa Café: where start-ups meet, work and test products (Forbes)

Coupa Café is located in Palo Alto, California and it apparently looks like a common café. Nevertheless, for some time now its capacity is always almost complete. ¿The reason? Coupa Café has become a space where start-ups test the viability of its products before launching them into the market.

Usually, in Silicon Valley, the big technological companies, the venture capital companies or the Business Angels are the ones who traditionally help start-ups in its process of development and for getting the most of themselves. But it has been demonstrated that the local business can also help, as it would be at businesses such as Coupa Café where the product will be used.

In addition, for Coupa Café the fact of help the start-ups testing its products hasn’t gone unnoticed. Nowadays, it is difficult to find a free table, and the biggest companies in the sector have also been seen in the shop looking for new business ideas.

To establish a good contact net and test the new products are two unavoidable facts for every entrepreneur. Consequently, the idea of places where both activities can be developed at the same time seems very useful. This business model should be exported to other countries where the entrepreneurship rate was elevated, do someone want to do it? 

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Ten creativity lessons that drive your business (Expansión)

Innovation can’t disappear from your company, not even when it is consolidated.

The characteristics that define the entrepreneur –he sees solutions where others just see problems – have much to do with being creative: creativity is born from the divergence, from seeing with different eyes what everybody have seen. It is to discover what others haven’t discovered.

The entrepreneur is creative and, in addition, looks for original people with different answers, but which have capability so their ideas can be realized. Hire ground-breaking people is a difficult task in organizations which reward more the conservative attitude and are excessively afraid of failure. In to many companies the different thinking is not admitted and they don’t give what is needed so the good ideas can grow. The arrival or attraction of ground-breaking employees is a challenge for the change management capability, and the professionals who generate alternatives become uncomfortable for some managers, because inevitably the matter is to integrate people who are going to challenge them.

One of the most important factors that makes creativity appear is that a suitable environment is necessary. Innovation comes from sharing opinions and different ways of thinking, in a work climate in which it exists a mutual respect relationship between the employees and with the boss, and which doesn’t penalizes neither the different ideas nor the mistakes. Because innovations lies on experimentation and it fails many times, but it is the solution for discovering new ideas. 

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Companies which achieve to take off thanks to the ideas (Expansión)

In order to turn creativity into money, it is necessary to transform it to innovation, a concept which only the most profitable companies can raise. Running is no longer an activity to disconnect and give up the pressure, as mobile devices  include programs which help measuring the exercise performance.

“Nike keeps improving its popular iPhone application by adding a GPS medium. This advertising is an example of companies which have innovate by means of an alliance which allows them to increase its result account, because what do a pair of trainers and technology have in common? Nike and Apple have found the relation which took them to participate in the same race, but with a different number. “Creativity means to join ideas which weren’t linked before.  Innovation means putting those ideas into practice”, claims Juan Carlos Cuberio, Eurotalent’s president. “Innovation is the part which generates revenues”, adds Javier Rovira, Know How’s associate director and professor at ESIC. Fernando Trías de Bes, professor at ESADE and co-author of “Winning at innovation” together with Philip Kotler, specifies that “in the business world, innovation is impossible without creativity. But creativity without innovations is useless and sterile, because it doesn’t produce relevant issues”

This article highlights the need of innovating in order to take profit of creativity.  That is, creative ideas must be put into practice by innovation. Creativity mans to join ideas which weren’t linked, and innovations means to put them into practice. Consequently, it is important not to forget those concepts when transforming ideas into business concepts.  

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