6 Challenges To Improve Barcelona: Entrepreneurs Needed!

At Barcinno, our objective is to shine a spotlight on Barcelona’s innovation, technology, and entrepreneurship activity to the rest of the world. Why? Because we believe that the Barcelona ecosystem has a great foundation to become a major global hub for technological growth and forward-thinking progress. There are incubators, investors, progressive technological startups and (a few) multinational corporations, co-working places, business schools, stimulating competitions, accelerator programs and so much more. Read about the infrastructure in place Robin Wauters The Next Web post and for even more insight check out the comment section. But besides the business and financial opportunities, Barcelona is an amazing city to live in with (most days) with a great climate, world-class art and architecture to inspire new inventions, and great food from around the world. These conditions are appealing becoming more critical as technology allows us to work from anywhere. From the dozens of meetups happening each week, it’s clear that the city itself plays a major role in stimulating creativity and entrepreneurship.

In support of this message, we present to you BCN|Open Challenge. This new program is specially designed to attract startups and SME’s from all over the world to help Barcelona solve critical issues facing our ecosystem. Barcelona has defined 6 social challenges on which they would like to be advised and allocated a budget of a million euros to make the solutions for real.

The challenges for which Barcelona is seeking for high impact solutions are:

The solutions to these challenges should transform and improve public services, create a more inclusive city, accelerate innovation and leverage public spending more effectively to deliver better services. To make support startups from abroad, the Barcelona City Council offers an 6 months landing program, providing free temporary spaces, possible tax break, access to finance, human recruitment assessments and an agenda full with advisory aid on regulatory and procurement rules in Barcelona.

As a giveaway to Challenge #4; Digitize museum colletions and archives, have a look at what is happening in the Netherlands in the Groninger Museum. They made a fantastic effort in digitalizing their collection, but also customizing it to the visitors need. Wouldn’t it be great if this GM-collector gadget would work in all museums worldwide? If you want to learn more about the relationship between art and business, Saturday the 23th at IESE there will be a lecture on Should Business Meet Art?

Until then, keep an eye on Barcelona Growth because soon the challenges will be open for submission.