Captain's log, stardate d597.y38/AB

Last week, we hosted the first edition of the Corporate Innovation Summit and it went extremely well. Find more details down here!

Despite the Mobile World Congress / 4 Years From Now cancellations, we hosted the first edition of the Corporate Innovation Summit, an event for directors of innovation and CIOs of big corporates, and for startups who want to sell to large enterprises.

The event, co-organised by ACCIÓ and MarsBased/Startup Grind Barcelona, was held at the beautiful Antiga Fàbrica Estrella Damm. For an entire evening, over 250 people learnt from some of the best and biggest corporates and two startups, who shared their experiences in programs of Corporate Venturing or Corporate Innovation.

The event opened with some warm welcoming words by Laura Gil (Director of Digital Transformation @ Damm), to be followed by a panel about "The 7 myths of corporate venturing" with:

• Daniel Dümig (Innovation Manager @ ASICS)
• Albert Mundet (Innovation Hub Director @ FC Barcelona)
• Laura Urquizu (CEO @ RedPoints)
• Eszter Vas-Zoltan (Global Innovation Manager @ Nestle)
• Josemaria Siota (Executive Director @ IESE) - Moderator

After that, we followed with a second panel to discuss sales and business generation "From Contact to Contract: How to approach big corporations if you're a startup", with:

• Simone van Neerven (Head of Innovation @ Vueling)
• Jordi Torrent (Open Innovation Manager @ Damm)
• Ferran Càceres (Corporate Innovation @ Philip Morris)
• Cristina Vila (CEO & Founder @ Cledara)
• Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit (CEO @ MarsBased) - Moderator

We wrapped up the event with an excellent session of networking over dinner and delicious beer, hoping that new contacts (and contracts) will come out of it.

There are a lot of wisdom nuggets to take away from that event, mostly related to never accepting unpaid PoC's (Proof of Concept) if you're a startup, or the importance of ensuring that the C-levels of the corporate are involved in the collaboration, as well as making sure that the collaboration with a corporate must open new ways of distribution for the startups.

Check the videos of the panels here:

After the resounding success, the excellent feedback, and the fact that we had over 100 people on the waitlist who couldn't get a ticket, it seems like there's hunger in Barcelona for an event like this every year!

Stay tuned for more updates!