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How to build the Spanish Deep Tech Ecosystem, Challenges – Selected

The following is my distillation of the Spanish Deeptech ecosystem as obtains through countless hours of conference and event participation, data culled from The Collider‘s Technology Transfer and Business: Challenges and Opportunities report, and interviews done to key stakeholders and players from the Deeptech ecosystem in Spain including:

Many challenges arise from key players

1. Entrepreneurs & Researchers

  • Fear of missing their economic stability
  • Lacking knowledge on how to start their companies
  • Failure of projects due to a non specific market problem solution (focus on their research topics instead of looking at the market needs and trends)
  • Looking to license the technology instead of developing it into a business
  • Lack of emotional support and fear of emotional loneliness during the entire business creation process
  • Willingness to find alternatives to develop their projects and research out of academia

2. Tech Universities & R&D Centers

  • Need of more human capital
  • Need of more funding resources
  • Necessity to track spinoffs situation and evolution
  • Aquire more education on the business side
  • Need to have a closer relation with organisations
  • Need to understand technology applications in the market and business needs
  • Lack of exponential innovations (moonshots) vs incremental innovations
  • Lack of ecosystem unification (who is who?)

3. Organizations

  • Looking for incremental innovations, not exponential
  • Focus on short-medium term results
  • Lack of an agile collaboration structure (companies – startups)
  • Involvement in later stages, when risk is lower
  • Focus on the operational side, lack of time to understand market evolution and innovations developments
  • Looking to understand technology applicability in business
  • Looking for new business models to stay competitive in the market

4. Investors

  • Need for a bigger funding approach to initial phases and industrialisation stages (be more risk averse)
  • Looking for a higher number of qualitative and quantitive dealflow in scientific and new technology innovations
  • Need to adapt indicators for each stage: quantitative vs. qualitative

5. Public Institutions

  • Capital access to motivate researchers to start a business
  • Capital access for Deeptech innovations (TRL3-7 – 3 being “Experimental proof of concept” and 7 “Prototype demonstrated in a relevant environment.” )
  • Provide constant support to universities and R&D Centres
  • Attract talent to the city / region / country
  • Work on fiscal incentives to attract investments
  • Provide more visibility to Deeptech innovations
  • Educate about science and new technologies
  • Create quality job employment
  • Build a Deeptech entrepreneurship culture since School
  • Boost and expose more science into the market
  • Knit the Deeptech innovation culture

Therefore, in order to build a strong Deeptech ecosystem, Spain must provide more visibility and exposure, more resources, funding capital and, especially, more education on scientific and high technologies to its citizens and key players.

Building relationships between key players is vital and necessary. If the Spanish economy wants to become a strong economy, investing in the Deeptech ecosystem is key for its long-term survival.

Stay tuned as I expect to have my part followup, (Part 2), with further data and conclusions within the next weeks.

In the meanwhile, three events you should take a look at:

International Conference on Agricultural, Biotechnology, Biological and Biosystems Engineering – 21-22 October 2020 – ICABBBE 2020 aims to bring together leading academic scientists, researchers and research scholars to exchange and share their experiences and research results on all aspects of Agricultural, Biotechnology, Biological and Biosystems Engineering.

Kaspersky Security Summit – 6-8 October 2020 – The Kaspersky Security Analyst Summit (SAS) is a yearly event that gathers high-caliber anti-malware researchers, global law enforcement agencies and CERTs and senior executives from financial services, technology, healthcare, academia, and government agencies.

BIO-Europe 2020 Digital – 26-29 October 2020 – BIO-Europe is the largest partnering conference in Europe dedicated to the global biotechnology industry. This year reaches its 26th edition and will be held in digital format.

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Events 2 days ago

Last week, I spent three days at Bits and Pretzels in Munich — a startup-focused event with a distinctly Bavarian flavor. Think Oktoberfest meets startup conference, complete with dirndls, lederhosen, and more beer than you might expect. As someone building an AI-powered event platform, I went in with a specific mission: Observe how startups actually market themselves at events. Here’s what I discovered: GoodBytz: The power of good demos What they did: Robotics startup GoodBytz set up a booth where its robots prepared kaiserschmarrn (a traditional German dessert) all day long. Why it worked: Nothing beats seeing a product in action. While other booths had brochures and demos, GoodBytz’s robots were actually cooking. The smell, the movement and the end result stirred together an experience that people will remember and talk about. The lesson: If you have a physical product, show it in action. The old writing adage generalizes well: Show, don’t tell.  Let people see, hear and touch the product. WeRoad: The bathroom hack What they did: Posted “Missing Investor” flyers in bathroom stalls with QR codes pointing to their website. Why it worked: Pure genius. Every startup at the event was looking for investors, but the “Missing Investor” headline, while a bit on the nose, proved irresistible. Plus, bathroom stalls are one of the few places where people have 30 seconds to actually read something. The lesson: Think about where your target audience’s attention will remain undivided. Sometimes, the most effective marketing leverages the most unexpected places. Emqopter: Visual impact matters What they did: Designed a bright orange booth that displayed their drone prominently. Why it worked: In a sea of grey, white, beige and brown, Emqopter’s bright orange booth was impossible to overlook. The drone was real, too, and proved a real conversation starter. The lesson: Your booth is competing with hundreds of others. Make it visually distinctive and ensure your product is the hero. Quests: Community building using the product What they did: Created a busy, branded booth with accessories (toy car, traffic cones, a bulletin board) and used their anti-loneliness app to build communities among founders at the event. Why it worked: Quests used their product to solve a real problem right at the event, and the busy booth design generated energy and curiosity. The lesson: Use your product to solve a problem at the event — if it’s possible, of course. Demonstrate your value in real time. Dyno: Event-themed marketing What they did: Distributed branded electrolyte packs with the tagline “Your hangover ends. Your pension lasts – with Dyno.” Why it worked: Dyno aligned its messaging perfectly with the Oktoberfest theme. Every attendee was thinking about beer and hangovers, so Dyno’s goodies were quite relevant. The tagline was clever, memorable, and directly addressed a pain point most people at the event might have to deal with later. The lesson: Tailor your marketing to the event’s theme and culture. The more you tie your messaging and product to the context, the more memorable you become. So, what did I learn? Event marketing is about more than just showing up and setting up a booth; you have to understand your audience and create experiences that people will remember. Here’s what really struck me: most startups and even big companies don’t know how to leverage events properly. They book the booth, show up and hope for the best; maybe they bring some branded pens and a pop-up banner. Then they’ll go back home and wonder why they spent €5,000 in exchange for 50 business cards that never convert. The startups that stood out at Bits and Pretzels understand something fundamental: event ROI isn’t about booth size or location; it’s about strategy, creativity and planning. None of the startups above improvised on-site, or planned something the night before the event in their hotel rooms. They laid everything out 4-6 weeks before the event. A solid pre-event strategy is what separates successful event marketing from expensive booth rental.  But what matters most for early-stage startups is that you don’t need a massive budget to stand out. WeRoad’s bathroom stall hack probably cost €50 to print the flyers. A standard booth package at Bits and Pretzels would go for €3,000 to €5,500. The ROI difference is staggering when you compare the cost per meaningful conversation. That’s the difference between simply spending money and investing smartly. Building Sesamers has taught me that helping startups find the right events is only half the equation. The other half is helping them understand how to maximize ROI once they’re there. Good props aren’t a marketing expense; they’re opportunities to meet customers, investors and partners, and strike up engaging conversations.

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