Day: 26 March 2024

• Juanma Revuelta, CEO of the Finnova Foundation, will present the SEUA, the Foundation’s own open innovation methodology to boost the success of startups and SMEs
• The event will launch the INDUSTRIAL WATER STARTUP EUROPE AWARDS to promote the challenge of industrial waters in Lombardy and Valencia

03/26/2024, Brussels. Juanma Revuelta, CEO of the Finnova Foundation, will represent the foundation at the “Clusters Meet Regions” event to be held in Milan (Italy) today, Tuesday, March 26, and tomorrow, Wednesday, March 27, 2024. The event is a space that will allow collaboration and knowledge exchange between European regions.

Revuelta will speak tomorrow at the event to explain the details and benefits of the Startup Europe Awards (SEUA) methodology, promoted by the European Commission and Finnova Foundation itself. The SEUA methodology, used since 2016 in various entrepreneurship initiatives, has a proven track record in fostering public-private collaboration and promoting innovation to boost the success of startups and SMEs facing challenges. This methodology is designed to address current challenges and promote innovative solutions aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Water SEUA: The Industrial Water Challenge

The focus of the presentation will be the launch of the second edition of the Water Startup Europe Awards, this time centered on collaboration between the Valencian Community and the Lombardy region (Italy), and focused on the management of industrial waters.

The new edition, supported by the Finnova Foundation, IVACE (Valencian Institute for Business Competitiveness), the Lombardy Region, and Wex Global, seeks to attract innovation and offer sustainable solutions to the challenges faced by industrialization in both regions. This initiative comes at a particularly sensitive time due to the impact of increasingly frequent droughts, affecting mainly four critical sectors: the agri-food industry, the fashion and textile industry, the ceramics industry, and the automotive industry. Lombardy and Valencia are emerging as the ideal regions to host an Accelerathon (idea acceleration contest) focused on the management of wastewater and industrial waters in these areas, especially because of their strengths in innovation, sustainability, and water management.

The challenge launch aims to invite entrepreneurs, startups, SMEs, universities, and corporations to participate and contribute innovative solutions. Participants will have the opportunity to win a European Acceleration Ticket, which will allow them access to significant European programs and develop projects with funds of up to 5 million euros.

Success cases

The Finnova Foundation partners in various European projects that bet on international cooperation and water management.

RES4CITY is a European project aimed at enhancing the development of sustainable renewable energies and fuel technologies in cities through the joint design of an educational program and the promotion of sustainability and circularity. It also includes an Accelerathon that proposes solutions focused on the revalorization of greywaters. The project, funded by the Horizon program, has a budget of 2.5 million euros.

Another project funded by the Horizon program is ONE-BLUE, which focuses on researching emerging pollutants and the effects of climate change on marine biodiversity and biota. With a budget of 6.2 million euros, ONE-BLUE will collect samples in the Atlantic Ocean, the Arctic, and the Mediterranean Sea to understand this harmful impact on marine biodiversity and biota.

LIFE ECOdigestion 2.0 aims to become the most versatile digestion control tool on the market, achieving environmental and economic benefits through the production of biogas by optimizing the use of organic waste. The project is financed by the LIFE program and has a budget of more than 970,000 euros, betting on biogas generation in sewage treatment plant digesters through the mixture of putrescible organic wastes (manure, poultry, organic fractions, MSW, HORECA, etc.).

Lastly, the MANUFACTURING4ALL project, with a budget of 60,000 euros and financed by the Erasmus+ program, is dedicated to implementing good practices based on digital competencies and transforming towards Industry 4.0.

Water SEUA aims to highlight the importance of international collaboration and sustainable innovation in water management, thus supporting the ecological and digital transition in Europe within the framework of the green and digital transition. The Finnova Foundation aims to demonstrate with this new initiative its commitment to those projects that promote sustainable practices, key to understanding the challenges we face.

About the Finnova Foundation

Finnova is a Spanish-Belgian non-profit foundation based in Brussels, which focuses on promoting innovation and entrepreneurship in the European Union. The foundation works in collaboration with various organizations and partners in the member countries to communicate and spread European projects. In addition, it offers support to start-ups and businesses through programs such as accelerators and incubators, and selection and award ceremonial events.

FU-TOURISM presents the first workshop of the cycle of 6 workshops that it will offer in the coming months. The workshop took place on Thursday 21 March at the Transfiere fair, the leading R&D&I forum in southern Europe.

Finnova is co-organiser of this workshop, which is also part of the Startup Europe Week SEW24.

Finnova Foundation has been in charge of presenting the workshop “FU-TOURISM STAKEHOLDER WORKSHOP: €4M for Sustainable Innovation and Green Entrepreneurship in the Spanish tourism ecosystem“ at the Transfiere fair, held in FYCMA, Malaga, from 20 to 22 March. The meeting brought together various agents from the Spanish tourism ecosystem to discuss issues such as digital development and the green transition within the sector.

The objective of the hybrid workshop, which was broadcast live from the Transfiere fair, was to analyse the opportunities and challenges of the Spanish tourism sector through the exchange of best practices focused on the digitalisation and sustainability of the ecosystem. The speakers presented examples and best practices in digitalisation and sustainability in tourism, highlighting the opportunities and challenges. The event was developed around a stakeholder panel and a round table after the presentations that allowed all the speakers to discuss the challenges of sustainability and digitalisation in various tourism sectors.

The stakeholder panel of the workshop was divided into three blocks. The first focused on sustainability and the environment, with the participation of experts in the sector such as the director of Tourism and Business Development Costa del Sol Malaga, Pedro Barrionuevo Gener and the CEO of Stemy Energy, Álvaro Sánchez Miralles. In the second block, focused on digitalisation and twin transition, the Founder of the Ibero-American Forum of Sustainable Tourism #TuriSOS, Alex Che, the Director of the Chair of Innovation of the Gandía Campus of the UPV, Jose Marín-Roig Ramón and the director of ASICOTOUR, Ana Belén Fernández Seijas, took part. Finally, the Design Lead, Regenerative Transformation and Eco-social Ecosystems, Sharam Yalda, addressed Market Intelligence, showing how to use this term for the development of sustainable tourism.

The workshop concluded with a panel discussion moderated by Patricia Cavanillas, Director of Communication and Institutional Relations at Finnova. Throughout the debate, the speakers presented their opinions on various topics related to the current situation and the short-term future of the Spanish tourism industry. 

The panelists wanted to underline the challenge faced by tourism in aligning itself with innovation; the need to connect existing entrepreneurial initiatives with tourism. When it came to defining the situation of tourism in Spain, most of the speakers agreed on the complex situation it is going through, with a large number of micro-destinations to promote, but they also highlighted the positive note in the evolution of the use of digital tools, which favours entrepreneurship. On the other hand, another aspect on which the round table agreed was the virtues that the union of public and private entities can bring to tourism and the creation of systems so that small agents can contribute value to the sector. 

Juanma Revuelta, CEO of the Finnova Foundation, wanted to highlight two other topics discussed at the table: the opportunities that tourism can offer in depopulated Spain and the need to align the ecological transition with the sector.  On the other hand, Revuelta also highlighted the current tools provided by the European Union in terms of tourism promotion to help repopulate uninhabited areas.

With this workshop, the Finnova Foundation also became co-organiser of Startup Europe Week (SEW24), an initiative that is present in more than 300 cities in almost 50 countries, making it the largest regional entrepreneurship event in the world.

FU-TOURISM project: support network for tourism SMEs  

The workshop is part of a cycle of 6 workshops showcased by the European project FU-TOURISM, which is funded by the COSME programme with 4 million euros. The project aims to assist small and medium-sized tourism enterprises in Europe in their transition towards a green, digital and inclusive economy, with a focus on implementing the principles of the regenerative economy.  The project will have a duration of 36 months (2023-2026), is composed of entities from Croatia, Belgium, Spain, Greece, Austria, Poland and Italy and is led by EUPOLIS Group. The Finnova Foundation is leading the transferability, replication and communication of the project, considering the innovation methods used by Startup Europe Awards (SEUA), a strategy promoted by Startup Europe and supported by the European Commission. SEUAs are a tool to identify disruptive SMEs and startups that foster public-private collaboration and promote self-employment as a driver of job creation.