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- ‘Spain Start Up: South Summit’ is the leading entrepreneurship exhibition in southern Europe. It is organised by Spain Startup and the IE Business School, and has the support of Endesa for the fourth consecutive year, together with Banco Sabadell’s BStartup and Google for Entrepreneurs.
- As part of its open innovation model, Endesa continues to work closely with entrepreneurs as a source of solutions to technological challenges.
- More than 280 international speakers, investment funds, venture capitalists and business angels already signed up for the event to be held from 5 to 7 October in the municipal space LA N@VE, Madrid.
Forging close ties with entrepreneurs continues to be Endesa’s goal as it participates for the fourth consecutive year in ‘Spain Start Up: South Summit’, the leading entrepreneurship exhibition in Southern Europe. This year the exhibition will be held in Madrid, from 5 to 7 October, but in a new setting: LA N@VE, the centre of inspiration, education and open innovation with which the city of Madrid aims to transform the economic and social future of its citizens.
South Summit is organised by Spain Startup and the IE Business School, and will again become a meeting place between the most innovative startups and leading international investment funds and the most innovative corporations, including Endesa, which, once again, will be a global partner of the event. This year, 280 international speakers, investment funds, venture capitalists and business angels have already confirmed their attendance. Last year, the event was attended by more than 7,000 people of 34 different nationalities, 3,500 entrepreneurs and 1,800 major companies.
This year, Endesa will once again have a stand in the area known as the market place, a meeting place for all the other participants, where the company will present its various initiatives related to entrepreneurship and its innovation model – an open model to forge close ties with entrepreneurs to develop solutions to transform the current energy model.
The 100 finalist startups that South Summit has just announced will also be located in the market place. These finalists have been selected from more than 3,000 projects submitted to the Startup Competition – a higher figure than in all the previous years. The 100 finalist startups represent a total of 17 different nationalities, with 63% of the projects being of Spanish origin and 10% belonging to the energy and industrial sector. Technological innovation and the feasibility and scalability of projects were all taken into account when selecting the 100 finalists.
New disruptive technologies will be the focus of this year’s South Summit programme, ‘The Disruptor’s Playground’, in which the impact of innovations on the major industries will be analysed. High-profile speakers have been invited to talk about this subject, including Allen Blue, co-founder of LinkedIn (sold this summer to Microsoft for more than 26,000 million dollars); Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari and Brainrush and one of the pioneers of the video games industry; Jim McKelvey, one of the founders of Square; and Brent Hoberman, entrepreneur and founder of Lastminute.com and of Founders Factory, a private network of digital and technological entrepreneurs, as well as Made.com and Founders Forum.
Prizes
The event will last for three days, providing an ideal backdrop for the emergence of new startups in Spain, the arrival of more entrepreneurs in our country and the creation of an efficient network of investors, and will end with the awarding of the competition prizes. Endesa will be part of the jury for the competition and will be responsible for choosing the winning startups in the category of Energy & Industry.