IQS Tech Fest, Europe’s First Festival Of Industrial Startups, Arrives In Barcelona

The new edition will be held on the 24th of January in the Antiga Fàbrica Damm in Barcelona to celebrate Industrial Entrepreneurship

 

IQS Tech Factory, the center of entrepreneurship of IQS and Spain’s first Industrial accelerator, will return on 24 January to the Antiga Fàbrica Estrella Damm in Barcelona to celebrate the third edition of IQS Tech Fest, the first festival of industrial startups in Europe. The festival will be supported by BASF and Lubrizol, and will be launched in collaboration with BStartup, ANSYS and Fundació Damm.

In this new edition, the event, which was born with the aim of promoting industrial innovation, arrives another year with a whole day dedicated to entrepreneurship with a scientific-technical base. On this occasion, the IQS Tech Fest will pay tribute to the 50th anniversary of the arrival of the first man on the moon and one of the most important revolutions that emerged from this great achievement- The Moonshot Revolution. A movement that brought to society a new way of facing challenges and making possible what had been thought impossible.

This 2019 IQS Tech Fest will welcome the Moonshot Innovators, the new generation of industrial startups that develop technologies to solve global problems that no one has solved so far. The core of the event will focus on exposing technologies of 40 science-based startups from the following sectors: Advanced Industrial Techniques; Automation and Robotics; Health; New Materials; Chemistry; Energy and Environment; Wearables; Food, Consumer Goods and Sports. The festival will once again have an exhibition area in which national and international companies will exhibit their technologies; a program of conferences with international speakers and an industrial investment forum.

In the framework of the IQS Tech Fest, the most consolidated science-based startups will participate in a closed-door investment forum and will have the opportunity to present their technologies to investors and corporates.

The game-changers come on stage

IQS Tech Fest wants to become again the meeting place for the most restless and futuristic minds of the ecosystem. For this reason, the festival will unite in the same program reference speakers in the world of innovation, entrepreneurs who are transforming space from the Earth and experts from industrial companies in Corporate Venturing, to speak about of the growth of collaboration between startups and established companies.

Alex Rodríguez, Knowledge Curator at Alpha, Telefonica’s moonshot factory and Europe’s first one focused on this kind of projects, will be one of the keynote speakers of the festival with his presentation about ‘Exponential universe in the art of Moonshoting‘. The audience will have the opportunity to learn about the impact of the Moonshot revolution in today’s world and discover some of the well-kept secrets of innovations that will change our future through one of the leading experts in this field.

IQS Tech Fest conference program will also count the presence of Luís Pérez – Breva, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Innovation Teams Enterprise (MIT Engineering and MIT Sloan), who will join the conference program with his keynote on ‘Solving for Innovating: “Minimum Viable” or Venturing into the impossible?‘. The author of the book Innovate: A Doer’s Manifesto for Starting from a Hunch, Prototyping Problems, Scaling Up, and Learning to Be Productively will break down attendee’s preconceptions and introduce a new way of understanding innovation, thus breaking with the beliefs established so far. Luís Pérez-Breva is an expert in deep technology for the impact and especially in the application of artificial intelligence to solve real-world problems.

The festival will also bring the most visionary minds of the Spanish startup ecosystem on stage through the roundtable ‘Technologies made in Spain that are changing the space‘. The audience will immerse in a futuristic journey and discover the most relevant startups that are transforming and making the space exploration a reality. Carles Franquesa, COO at Aistech Space, Izan Peris, Product Manager at Zero 2 Infinity and Adrià Argemí, CEO at Pangea Aerospace will be the protagonists of a unique roundtable, that will be moderated by Gemma Milne, freelance journalist of The Guardian, BBC and the Financial Times.

Finally, IQS Tech Fest conference program will dedicate a slot to Corporate Venturing, an increasing concept in the startup ecosystem. The panel discussion ‘Corporate Venturing State of the Art‘ will feature experts coming from leading industrial companies such as Markus Solibieda, Managing Director at BASF Venture Capital GmbH, Mariona Sanz, Open Innovation Manager at Girbau, and Jesús Santamaría, Business Director EMEAI at Lubrizol Engineered Polymers. Together they will analyze the latest trends in Corporate Venturing.

Meeting the 2018 Most Promising Startup

Attendees will also meet the 10 startups of IQS Next Tech, Spain’s first industrial acceleration program, at the Demo Day to be held within the framework of the IQS Tech Fest. A jury of leading actors in the ecosystem will be in charge of choosing the Most Promising Industrial Startup of 2018, which will travel to Boston to continue promoting its technology in the immersion program by Richi Entrepreneurs.

The previous edition of the largest celebration of industrial entrepreneurship in Europe

On January 25 of 2018, IQS Tech Fest arrived for the first time in Barcelona, with the support of the General Council of Cambres de Catalunya; the Chamber of Commerce of Barcelona and Catalunya Emprèn of the Generalitat de Catalunya. With this edition, IQS Tech Factory transformed the IQS Tech Fair, held in 2016, in a festival that was born with the aim of being the reference meeting of industrial entrepreneurship.

The last edition brought together 1,200 attendees for a full day at Antiga Fàbrica Damm, including more than 100 investors. All of them had the opportunity to learn about the technologies of the 50 participating industrial startups in an exhibition area; attend a conference program led by international speakers such as: Lynette Kucsma, co-founder and CMO of Natural Machines; Stephen Dunne, director of Neuroelectrics; Alfons Cornella, founder of Infonomia and Neil Harbisson, the first cyborg in the world recognized by the British Government.

In the framework of the IQS Tech Fest 2018, the first investment forum focused exclusively on industrial startups took place, in which 9 of the most consolidated companies presented their projects to investors and corporations. The last edition was closed with a final party in which all participants and attendees established new synergies.

Get your ticket at https://iqstechfest.com/tickets/ and join the Moonshot Revolution!