Barcelona: the city of entrepreneurial marvels

Throughout its history, Barcelona has shown itself to be a city with initiative and a great capacity for innovation. As a result of this mindset, it has won a place in the “Champions League” of the entrepreneurial capitals of Europe.

In fact, according to the Digital Startup Ecosystem Overview, Barcelona is the fifth urban area on the list, behind London, Paris, Berlin and Dublin, in terms of the number of startups, with a total of 1,100 organizations engaging 58% of the State’s total investment, amounting to 453 million euros. As for technological entrepreneurship, Barcelona is the third most attractive city in Europe for creating new projects, surpassed only by Berlin and London. To paraphrase the writer Eduardo Mendoza, we could say that Barcelona has become “the city of entrepreneurial marvels”.

In recent decades, Barcelona has created a high-level entrepreneurial ecosystem, chiefly due to its unique public-private partnership model, whereby institutions, universities and companies have joined forces to coin the term “Barcelona model”.

In this regard, the role played by Fira de Barcelona has been fundamental, as an entity which has always stood alongside its companies and economic sectors. Thus, eight years ago, it supported the initiative by Barcelona City Council to create Bizbarcelona by Barcelona Activa, the trade fair for entrepreneurs, SMEs and the social economy which has become established as a benchmark event on the calendar.

Currently, the fair, promoted by the City Council, the Catalan Government, CaixaBank, Barcelona Provincial Council, the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona, PIMEC and the Barcelona Chamber of Commerce are seeking to accompany companies in their digital transformation processes and, in addition, allow for initiatives from other economies to promote new socio-economic models, such as those of the social and solidarity economy, the economy for the common good and cooperativism.

At this year’s event, Bizbarcelona by Barcelona Activa will present a new feature, the Biz Digital Experience by Sportmas area, to publicize the latest trends and strategies to enable commerce and the catering sector to adhere to the new era of point-of-sale digitization and to encourage a change of model in the customer relationship.

This new space will join the wide array of activities at the fair, set to take place on 30 and 31 May in Halls 1 and 2 of the Montjuïc Fira de Barcelona site and divided into four blocs with transformation as their central theme, comprising technological, social, economic and business matters. In addition, BizBarcelona will go a step further with “The next”, a space with inspirational talks on the trends which are on the way.

Talks with around 200 experts, multiple spaces for guidance when creating or expanding businesses, networking activities, programs for exports and access to new international markets, the search for funding for business projects and the franchise system as a formula for doing business with lower risks make up the 2018 Bizbarcelona by Barcelona Activa proposal.