Tech Review’s Top 10 Emerging Technologies event in Madrid

Experts agree that although entrepreneurship in Spain is growing”exponentially,” its future will be to “highlight its value and create businesses,” says Richard Kivel, President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Enterprise Forum or (MITEF) and Javier García, co-founder of Rive Technology and winner of MIT’s TR35, which recognizes outstanding young innovators across the globe.

Garcia, who also directs the Molecular Nanotechnology Lab at the University of Alicante, speaks frankly saying: “[In Spain] We educate for employability and financial illiteracy, instead of encouraging young people to be entrepreneurs.”  For that reason, he says, “we now have the best educated youth in history with 40% unemployment and extremely low wages.”  As long as college students finish their studies not as “job creators, but job seekers,” there will be no change in the economic model that Spain needs to end youth unemployment, according to Garcia.  In his opinion, the solution is a change in attitude, not only in education but in Spanish society.

Another problem is that although Spain conducts a lot of research, it fails to transfer knowledge from lab to market.  ”Many countries have good researchers but few companies create and market the results of their research,” said Kivel who is also the sponsor of the Bankinter Foundation of Innovation and president of Biologics Rhapsody,  which participated in the the emerging technologies report presentation, TR10 on June 27 in Madrid.

Top 10 Emerging Technologies presentation with Pedro Moneo

Kivel and Garcia both attended the event, at which the magazine Technology Review, under the direction of Pedro Moneo, director of Technology Review.es and founder of Opinno, presented its annual report on the ten most promising new technologies.  Moneo took the occasion to launch EmTech Spain: the exclusive conference of reference for worldwide emerging technologies, which the MIT Technology Review organizes every year in the United States.  The event, which will be held in Spain for the first time, will bring together business leaders, investors, scientists, technologists, academics, and entrepreneurs and will take place in in Malaga on October 26th and 27th , 2011.

The presentation ceremony of TR10, held at the Rafael del Pino Fundation, was also attended by Pablo Fernandez, president of MITEF Spain and Sebastián Muriel, director of Tuenti. Muriel asserted that the success of a product is no longer dependent on long phases of research and production but the social experience. Juan Tomás Hernani, Secretary of State for Innovation, also said, “there are no ventures which are going well or going poorly but businesses which are adequately internationalized or not.”

View more pictures from the presentation here