Barcelona surrenders to artificial intelligence

Since the opening of the doors of this new edition at the Mobile World Congress (MWC 2018), the role of Artificial Intelligence, the development of 5G, virtualization and the connectivity of objects was perceived. In this new edition it is Artificial Intelligence that focuses all eyes, voice recognition, chatbots, virtual assistants, the Internet of Things, the autonomous car, robotics, virtual and augmented reality, quantum computing, digital transformation, services in the cloud, cybersecurity or data analytics. "Artificial Intelligence is being applied successfully to change what is possible with a large number of interactions with different technologies," explains José Luis Sancho, managing director of Accenture Digital Spain, Portugal and Israel.
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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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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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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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