BSC Spin-Off companies generate about 100 new jobs in Barcelona.
Is science an economic engine for Barcelona? Since 2017, Catalonia has been the region with the highest number of innovative companies in Spain and is the fourth most innovative city in Europe. Following such a trend, from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, in the last six years, ten Spin-off companies, have been created, which join such innovative ecosystem seeking to be able to develop frontier science beyond academia.
However, at the European and Spanish levels, everything indicates that, despite holding leading positions in the world in terms of knowledge generation, both locations seem to suffer from the same problem: the process of transferring technology to the market is quite a gap.
Seven BSC Spin-offs met to discuss their past, present and future to confirm this trend and encourage entrepreneurship development from public research on Friday, October 22, 2021. In this session, the need to generate an ecosystem that can keep deep tech-based entrepreneurship interconnected became clear.
In this day, framed within the Innovation Journey program of entrepreneurship of the BSC and EuroCC Spain RES, one of the participants, Mariano Vázquez, CEO of ELEM Biotech, noted the scale of jobs and systemic growth potential currently achieved by the BSC Spin-offs. Since the creation of the first of them, Nostrum Biodiscovery, in 2015 until 2021, beginning in a research centre that today employs about 750 workers, 100 additional jobs in Barcelona were created through Spin-off companies.
Barcelona ranks as the third best city in Europe for entrepreneurship. Its research centers, for their part, manage to generate an amount of knowledge that raises it to be the 5th European city in terms of scientific production. However, it seems that today, the paths of research and entrepreneurship have followed their parallel paths of growth. Is it time to facilitate an intersection?
