Keynote speakers include Krista Keränen, an expert in co-creation working in Finland; Lita Nelsen, director of MIT’s KTT office; and Nuria Oliver, computer scientist with several international awards who has worked at MIT, Vodafone, Telefónica, and Microsoft.

Krista Keränen gave the first plenary talk of the meeting and talked about the concept of co-creation: "co-creation is a joint value creation process; it is about understanding customers, creating concepts together, and building business and technology based on people's needs, always from the customers point of view". Lita Nelsen, who closed the Thursday session, emphasized that "technology transfer does not make money, but it is a long term societal investment and necessary to build an entrepreneurial culture".

Nuria Oliver, who gave the first talk on Friday, talked about how Big Data obtained from mobile phones can help us understand aspects of human behavior that could help impove the world, especialy in the areas of natural disasters and humanitarian crises (floods, earthquakes...), public health (infection diseases...), urban studies (smart cities, crime hotspots in cities...), transportation (traffic jams, CO₂ emissions...), energy (high consumption locations...), population studies (national statistics...) and agriculture (migrations of workers...). 

Carmen Vela, the Spanish Secretary of State for Research, Development, and Innovation inaugurated the conference, and highlighted how Severo Ochoa and María de Maeztu centres and units "are not an expense, but an investment." Vela recognised the outstanding outputs of Spanish science: "While our scientists are just 1 % among all the researchers in the world, […] they publish around 5% of the scientific papers." She also pointed out that knowledge transfer should become a ‘circular concept’ and benefit researchers, industries, and society.

One of ICMAB's objective for the following year, is to invigorate the technology transfer activities. Fresh news regarding this topic will be given in the following months. Follow us for more updates! 

Read the press release of Thursday here, and of Friday here.