On the 10th March we held the seminar “Vitamins for your Business: Grants and Incentives to Push your Company Growth” at the offices of the Spanish Chamber. It was organised in collaboration with Zabala Innovation Consulting, a member company of the Chamber.
Our Secretary General, Igor Urra, gave a warm welcome to all attendees on behalf of our institution and introduced the speakers, Laura Álvarez and Aritz Goñi.
They started by explaining that Zabala Innovation Consulting is an independent international consulting firm skilled in comprehensive innovation management, that contributes to their clients’ success in the development of innovative products, processes or services. Their goal is to make innovation the key factor of the competitiveness of organisations they work for.
Our speakers Laura Álvarez and Aritz Goñi, explaining what innovation means.
Laura and Aritz provided attendees with a general framework on what innovation means. For them, to innovate is “to be creative, smart and ground-breaking in turning your new ideas into value for clients and creating new business opportunities.” As they explained, the Zabala team works from the point of view that innovation can happen in any sector and in any company. It is only necessary to have an idea, take the opportune actions to set it in motion, and then use the necessary resources to bring the project to the market successfully.
As resources are key to any company wishing to grow, our speakers then went on to discuss different kind of grants companies can have access to, both nationally and at European or international level. As they pointed out, the bigger the scope of the grant, the more difficult it is for a company to be successful. Therefore, it is essential to work with skilled professionals that help companies in every stage of the process. In addition to this, Laura and Aritz also highlighted how tax incentives offered to companies that work on R&D and innovation play a key role in improving a company’s results.
To conclude the seminar, they put forward a few examples of successful projects they had carried out at Zabala and shared some tips on how to find grants and incentives offered by the UK Government and the European Commission, as well as explaining what other institutions manage similar programmes for companies to apply to.
The breakfast provided attendees with the opportunity to network after the talk.
The Q&A session proved very fruitful, as attendees could enquire about specific opportunities related to their business sector and gather further details on the average length of these processes and potential outcomes in the event the project fails.
At the end of the seminar, the participants had some time to mingle and discuss their key learnings while enjoying a nice breakfast. We would like to thank all attendees for their active participation as well as Laura and Aritz from ZABALA for sharing their insights into such an interesting topic.
Last but not least, we encourage you to keep updated on all the activities of the Spanish Chamber by visiting our UPCOMING EVENTS section.