Zina Jarrahi Cinker  0:00  

Good morning, everyone. To those of you who were here before yesterday, welcome back. And those of you who are new, welcome. We had an amazing day yesterday, it really the attendance, the conversations, we had really exceeded our expectations. Thank you for all of you who are part of it. And we're going to be starting our day two, with a topic, which I know is on everybody's mind these days, and it is a topic of good health. So today, we're going to be focusing on SDG number three. And we're going to continue conversations until I believe, 2:30 and then we're going to have some workshops. For those of you who have signed up for workshops, these workshops are going to be in the CC rooms. And with that, I'm going to keep it short. You've already heard me talk so much. So I'm going to welcome to the stage. Mr. Miquel Rodriguez Planas, Commissioner for the 2030 agenda from Barcelona City Council. Miquel, I said it right, I pronounced your name right. Thank you so much, Miquel, for your support.

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Miquel Rodriguez Planas  0:57  

Thank you, Zina. Good morning. I hope that you enjoyed yesterday, especially yesterday night. And I want to talk to you today, in my opening today about this project, the Barcelona Innovation Coast project that we're launching in Barcelona city council. So this project is basically a way to consolidate Barcelona as an international center of innovation. How are we going to do this? By creating a network of the agent of innovation and from here, boosting and coordination, the innovation in Barcelona. And you might ask yourself why we want to do this. If we have this Smart City Expo Event, the PUZZLE X, we have the mobile. We have plenty of events, plenty of innovation in Barcelona. Maybe you think you don't need to do that? Well, from our point of view, we think that we need to diversify our economy. Our economy in Barcelona, we knew it before the pandemic, we know now, after the pandemic or during the pandemic, that it's too centered on the service sector on the tourist sector on the hospitality sector, it's fine, it's what we have. But if we want to be smart, we have we want we need to diversify our economy. And when thinking about diversifying economy, we can take two paths. One path is to be cheaper. We don't want this path. The other one is to be innovative. 

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Miquel Rodriguez Planas  2:22

And we know that there's a relation, a strong relation, a positive relation between innovation and development. That’s something that’s known that something has been studied. So we want to bet on innovation, because we know that one euro invested innovation can generate 80 euros in GDP. So this is our goal, this is our will to bet on innovation. The good thing here is that we already have the assets, Barcelona is already there, Barcelona is in a good position in terms of innovation. For example, we're the fourth innovative city in Europe. We are also the fourth more attractive city in the world in terms of investment in research and development, among other positions. And the proof is that compared to other regions, Barcelona, Catalonia, in terms of research in publishing papers and journals, is in a very good position. However, when we move from research to innovation, we lose some positions. There's something wrong here. We're good about how to think, how to do research, we're not that good on how to innovate. And maybe one of the problems that we see here, it may be we're lack of investment, we need to have more investment. There are more reasons, but one of the reasons is that we are lacking we have a lack of investment in terms of innovation. So what is this project about? The Barcelona Innovation Coast I would like to say has four pillars. The first one is a territory, a space in Barcelona, that is already a space where innovation is happening. The second pillar, it's to create this network, a permanent platform to engage to support to boost innovation. The third pillar is to create several tools to help to mobilize and to attract investment. And the fourth pillar, and maybe the most important one, it's to not forget the 2030 agenda, that is why we're doing this to have a positive impact on the planet for people and make progress in society. So, the starting point of the Barcelona Innovation Coast is to find a zona, space of Barcelona 25% of the city. That is very interesting, because here we have already five universities 28 research centers, large companies, corporate in terms of ICT health and other energy, for example, and municipal and other administration management centers linked to innovation. And a very good thing here. If you look at real estate, I'm talking about real estate not talking about making big transformations, you have already five more than 500,000 square meters, in terms of offices that you can rent, or you can buy, that are larger than 1000 square meters. So there's a place where you can boost innovation.

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Miquel Rodriguez Planas  5:33 

That is something that we don't say to ourselves, it's been studied, there's been a study from the University of Barcelona. And we can see that in this zone of Barcelona, innovation is happening, creativity is happening. But when you think about innovation, it doesn't make sense to think about a specific zone or a specific territory. Innovation doesn't know about boundaries. So we think about overcoming this territory and influence the Metropolitan Barcelona and even farther than that. We want to create synergies between several partners in Barcelona and outside of Barcelona. Another pillar, I told you, it's in what we want to focus. And we want to focus in four strategic sectors. These are the sectors that we want to start with. But doesn't mean that we don't want to collaborate in other sectors. Why these sectors? First, because if you're looking at tech, and health, all the leading sectors in terms of innovation in Barcelona, and we want to help them to keep having this leadership, we want to have them being on the top. And mobility energy to us, they are crucial, because the future of cities will depend on how the future of mobility and the future of energy. So Barcelona wants to be there, wants to be a player, not only a buyer, but it wants to be a player in defining the future of cities in the future of mobility, and energy. 

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Miquel Rodriguez Planas  7:02

Another way to boost innovation is by creating a platform, a network, a stable network between all the actors of the innovation. That's why we're going to create a council, the council of Barcelona vision goals that will be launched before the end of the year. And in this council, we will have the administration's the public administration from Spain, we also will have the universities that are working in Barcelona, and also the business centers, we'll have the research centers, the knowledge and transfer centers, business associations, clusters, funding agents, everyone, everyone that can say something about innovation we want to have them there. And we're going to give them some support, we're going to create an Office Barcelona Innovation Coast to help find synergies between the research agents and the business agents. We also want to create a mentoring support space, it's what is called the Barcelona deep tech node. This is something launched about Barcelona to give our development agency and this Barcelona deep tech node, what is doing is helping spin off from the research sector to increase their investment and increase their capacity. We also want to create a virtual container, where all the resources related to the innovation are there. So you can be able to know from other silos because sometimes you will work on silos and also want to launch an open data platform regarding knowledge and innovation.

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Miquel Rodriguez Planas  8:40

One more important thing, we need finance, we need investment. Therefore we're going to create the deep tech investment fund. We're putting here 10 million euros from the public budget of the city council, these 10 million euros, we want to invest them together with the private sector, together with investment funds, together with other public investment funds, we're talking with the Spanish government, we're talking with the European Investment Fund, and together here in terms of investment in deep tech, what we want to do is invest in tiers, between three and seven, the ones that are in the deep in the death valley, we want to help them to this kind of spin off to be able to survive the death valley and to be able to go to the market afterwards. Last year we created the startup accelerator fund in Barcelona that is working very well also with 10 million from our side and plus 40 millions from the private sector. We're thinking about doing a second version of this accelerating fund in the future. And another very important thing for very specific strategic projects that we might have in Barcelona in terms of innovation, we want to create a specific investment mechanism for them. Another very important thing. This has to be for all we don't want to leave no one behind. So when we talk about innovation, what we want to do is to create European labs or sandboxes, where we can test, we can see how innovation is working to have it in the city, and also a very important thing, we want to create training programs for people that want to change their careers. They want to be also in the innovation sector. We already integrated the 42 Barcelona program together with Telefonica for training, high skills, and programmers. We also have the IT Academy, also in Barcelona. But basically what we're talking here is not only about digital, it's also about other sectors, mobility, energy and others, for people that want to upscale or rescale their capacities.

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Miquel Rodriguez Planas  10:48  

And last, as I said, this tool has to be used to achieve the 2030 agenda. What does that mean? We want to invest in innovation that has a positive impact in society. That means that we want to invest in projects that have a positive impact on the planet, a positive impact on people, a positive impact on prosperity. That is our main criteria, in terms of where we're going to invest. What we expect in 10 years is 40,000 direct jobs, 750 jobs linked into research and an economic return to the city of 235 million euros. So this is Barcelona vision goals. This is our one of our initiatives in terms of diversifying our economy in terms of boosting our economy. And because we know that innovation will define the future and we want to be part of the future. Thank you!

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