Runaway success at the Inspirational Matchmaking Event for the presentation of the 4.8-million-euro CreatiFI project
The first CreatiFI informative meeting sees the birth of 61 new projects which will compete for the 15 finalist places at the second phase in Barcelona
The Inspirational Matchmaking Event, organised by the Direcció de Creativitat i Innovació of the Barcelona Culture Institute (ICUB) proved to be a runaway success, with attendance by more than 250 people and the resulting presentation of 61 projects. These projects will compete for the 150,000 euro prizes awarded by the CreatiFI project, an initiative that offers professionals from the creativity and ITC-sector industries an opportunity to develop new projects.
During the event held in the Disseny Hub Barcelona, the director of the Creativity and Innovation Directorate, Inés Garriga, presented the accelerator project, CreatiFI, a project that is overseen by the ICUB directorate in conjunction with other European institutions (Trento, Helsinki and Brussels) and which forms part of the European Future Internet Public-Private Partnership (FIPPP) programme.
Over the three-hour period, creators and technicians were given the opportunity to present their ideas and establish working groups in an attempt to get them off the ground. Of the more than two hundred and fifty attendees who packed the Sala A of the Disseny Hub, approximately thirty managed to find collaborators for their projects while others arrived with their teams already consolidated.
The Inspirational Matchmaking Event proved to be the perfect platform for the sharing of ideas among entrepreneurs, startups, designers, advertisers, software programmers and developers, audio-visual and music producers, architects, publishers, gaming and video-game experts, artists and professionals from the ITC sector in general. The event was designed to encourage the creation of work teams for the preparation of proposals for the first phase.
The sixty-one projects presented during the Inspirational Matchmaking Event included ideas for such diverse environments as museums, didactic musical exchanges, the property sector, alternative tourism, child education, collaborative consumer platforms, quality healthcare and artisan workshops, among others.
The objective of the European CreatiFI
programme is to provide substantial financial backing for creators to innovate in their respective professional fields using the new technologies and Future Internet as a basis for their ideas. The programme will award a total of 4.8 million euros, which will be divided among the sixty most innovative projects, fifteen of which will be selected by an international jury in the Design Museum of Barcelona, DHUB.
Each project will receive up to 150,000 euros in two phases. The first phase of the project, which began on the 1st of October last and will close on the 30th of November, offers 50,000 euros plus a series of technological and business support services for the purposes of creating a prototype. The remaining 100,000 euros will be awarded during the second phase, which is open to new projects and will open for presentation from the 1st to the 31st of October, 2015. The objective of the second phase is to discover market openings for the products and services offered by the successful projects.
The next Inspirational Matchmaking Event will take place on the 3rd of November in the Fàbrica de Creació Fabra i Coats.