Novum 2015. "Science and enterprises are the engine of the future"

"We need dreamers (the scientists) to write the screenplay for the film. And cameramen and producers (the enterpreneurs) who make it possible. Science and enterprises are the future engine," said researcher and entrepreneur Javier García Martínez.

With these words, he closed his lecture The Adventure of the Enterpreneurship from Science, in the Saló de Cent of Barcelona City Council within the Novum, the festival of science, technology and innovation organized by BCN Innovació. A conference where dreams and cinema were ubiquitous throughout all his dissertation.

"The ability to dream and invent always accompanied me," said Javier García Martínez, who is director of the Laboratory for Nanotechnology at the University of Alicante, cofounder of Rive Technology Inc (Boston, MA) and member of the World Economic Forum Council on Emerging Technologies.

While appearing on the monitors of space an image of 'Cinema Paradiso', he recalled the films that his grandfather show him when he was child. He recalled how these films marked him and ended influencing their entrepreneurial interest: "I can not help but try to always seek an alternate ending".

Indeed, this interest is what led him to research in the field of nanotechnology, which highlights Javier García Martínez worldwide. As he explained, 'Innerspace' is the film that reappears in his thinking when he makes three-dimensional representations of his molecular experiments.

And as a 'Robin Hood's Errol Flynn, he swashbuckling defended the need to bring science and business, "we tend to separate them when in fact, they are one unit." He urged all stakeholders to promote within universities entrepreneurship, which, besides being an alternative source of resources, is a great tool to attract to classrooms the pupils who today prefer to study at home. And strongly condemned all fundamentalisms, main attackers of science.

In this regard, he spoke of the need to retrieve values as skepticism and doubt from the late astrophysicist and science writer Carl Sagan and reject all dogmas.

Finally, he got into 'The Time Machine', another movie that marked his past, and reminded us that "the future depends on what we do in the present." And the present, right now in Barcelona, is Novum, the festival that has turned the city into "a citizen laboratory in which to experiment," in the words of Deputy Mayor Jaume Ciurana, who presided over the ceremony.

Novum 2015

Festival of Science, Technology and Innovation

From 14 to 30 April

Follow the festival through social networks BCN Innovació or hashtag  #NOVUM2015