What does it take to thrive as a founder, not just build a successful venture?

Building a venture can be deeply rewarding, but it also comes with uncertainty, pressure, setbacks, difficult decisions, and emotional demands. Expect research-backed insights, real founder experiences, practical takeaways, and an open conversation with the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

For the fourth edition of Promoting Entrepreneurship: Lessons Learnt from Research, the Esade Entrepreneurship Institute brings research and practice together to explore an increasingly important topic: founders’ wellbeing.

The session will be led by Professor Annelore Huyghe from the Esade Entrepreneurship Institute, who will share research-backed insights into:

• What puts founders’ psychological and emotional wellbeing under pressure.

• How wellbeing affects decision-making, leadership, and venture development.

• How founders navigate setbacks, uncertainty, and persistent adversity.

• What investors, accelerators, and other ecosystem actors can do differently.

• How we can create healthier and more sustainable entrepreneurial journeys.

Following the presentation, Annelore will be joined by Marta Gràcia Vilar, CEO of Cloudworks, and other invited guests for a round-table discussion connecting the research with real experiences from the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

The evening will conclude with networking and an opportunity to connect with founders, researchers, investors, and other ecosystem professionals.

Agenda

• Welcome and introduction

• Research insights

• Round-table discussion

• Networking

📅 13 October 2026
📍 Cloudworks Sagrada Família, Barcelona

This event is hosted together with Cloudworks and forms part of Barcelona4Impact, the city-wide initiative bringing together events focused on impact, entrepreneurship, and solutions for people and the planet.

Places are limited. Register to secure your spot!

Shape your ideas with the free TaleS programme. If you’re over 50 and want to develop a new project, reinvent yourself professionally, or expand your network, the TaleS programme is for you.

This initiative by CISE and Fundación Mapfre offers practical training, mentoring, and the opportunity to compete for national prizes of up to €2,000. You don’t need to have a defined business idea—just the desire to keep making a contribution.

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What does it take to lead technology on a global scale?

Sergio Gago started founding companies at the age of 20 in Valladolid. Today, he is CTO of Cloudera, one of the world’s largest data platforms and one of Spain’s most internationally recognized tech leaders.

Have a question for Sergio Gago? Send it to us through the registration form.

Gago will sit down with an interviewer on stage for a Fireside Chat exploring not only the theory behind AI, but what is actually happening inside companies trying to deploy it in the real world.

• AI in production: the difference between experimenting with AI and turning it into real infrastructure. Why so many projects remain stuck at the prototype stage.
• Data governance: without well-governed data, AI agents become a risk rather than an advantage.
• Frankenstein platforms: the hidden cost of accumulating tools without a coherent architecture.
• AI agents: what they promise, where they fail, and how to deploy them without losing control.
• Private AI & technological sovereignty: what it really means to control your model — what data goes in, where it runs, and how to change it without rebuilding everything.
• Quantum Computing: when it will become relevant for businesses and which sectors are likely to see real-world impact first.
• The role of the CTO: what CEOs need to understand about technology today and the mistakes leadership teams make.

An event designed for decision-makers, not just those who write code: CTOs, CEOs, CIOs, VPs of Engineering, Data & AI leaders, investors, and tech leads with a business perspective.

Sergio Gago is a Spanish engineer with more than 20 years of experience as a CTO across startups, scaleups and corporations. He founded five companies before the age of 25, worked at Rakuten, led AI and Quantum Computing strategy at Moody’s, and today leads Cloudera’s technology vision from Berlin.

He is also Director of the Master’s in Big Data & AI at Barcelona Technology School, an early-stage angel investor, and a regular international speaker at events including the Swiss AI Summit, UN Open Source Week, MWC Barcelona and Cloudera Evolve.

After the talk, we’ll move into networking — with food and drinks, of course.

Want to bring someone along? Feel free to share this invitation with your network.

We look forward to seeing you there!

📅 DATE: Thursday, October 15th, at 7:00 PM
📍 LOCATION: InnoIT Consulting offices, C/ Diputació, 280, Ground Floor 2A, 08009 Barcelona
🗣️ LANGUAGE: Spanish

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​Sergio Gago en el pasado evento.

The initiative connects university students with sustainability experts and companies that present real-world challenges related to circularity. Throughout the day, students will work in mixed groups and take part in an AI-assisted co-creation methodology.

The programme includes the presentation of business challenges, group work, table rotations, innovation case studies and the evaluation of solutions based on their impact, feasibility and cost.

Participation is free for selected students and offers them the opportunity to meet sustainability professionals, work on real-world circular economy challenges and discover the career opportunities emerging in this field.

You can find more information and complete your registration through the participation form.

For more information, visit the WAS Circulamos Barcelona page.

​At InnoIT Consulting, we are delighted to invite you to our upcoming event, organised in collaboration with Claude Code Barcelona, on Wednesday, October 21.

• Magdalena Ruyú (Business Analytics Consultant, InnoIT Consulting)
• Johnny Fekete (Software Engineer, Reddit)

Two talks

🎙️ Code in Days, Decisions in Weeks: Coordinating Data and Business When AI Accelerates Delivery, Magdalena Ruyú

AI has dramatically reduced development timelines: what used to take weeks now takes days. But strategic decisions— what to build, where to pivot, or what to prioritise — still take weeks, if not months. This difference in pace is the new organisational bottleneck, exposing silos that longer timelines helped hide: technical teams delivering quickly, but in the wrong direction; business teams changing course without fully understanding the work involved; and a bridge between both worlds that can no longer rely on planning cycles.

This talk explores how the relationship between Development and Business changes when delivery is no longer the problem, and what needs to happen to ensure that coordination doesn’t become the new constraint.

🎙️ Context Is a Team Sport: Claude Code in Large, Existing Codebases, Johnny Fekete

Claude Code works great on a fresh project. But what about a codebase with years of history and dozens of engineers, each with their own AI setup?

In this talk, Johnny Fekete will show how a large team can share AI context within the repository: a shared layer for everyone, skills for recurring tasks, and a personal layer that remains your own. And there’s one step further: when the agent repeatedly makes the same codebase-specific mistake, the fix becomes a new rule, reviewed by the team like any other piece of code.

There will also be time for a dynamic Q&A and, of course, networking over food 🍕 and drinks 🍻.

👥 Are you joining us? Share this invitation with your contacts.

WHEN: Wednesday, October 21
WHERE: InnoIT Consulting offices, C/ Diputació, 280, Bajos 2ª, 08009, Barcelona
LANGUAGE: English

Vall d’Hebron University Hospital is looking for technology companies to develop, together with its clinical teams, solutions based on AI, medical data and digital twins to personalise the diagnosis, surgical planning and treatment of patients with complex conditions.

The tender is divided into 9 lots, covering areas such as paediatric cardiology, arrhythmias, liver tumours, migraine and robotic surgery.

• Estimated value: €7.27M
• Budget including VAT: €8.79M
• Duration: until December 2029
• Procedure: Open tender
• Objective: to develop and validate the solutions in a real clinical environment so they can be scaled up afterwards.

If you’d like to learn more, click here.

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Tech Up Nights are back! 🚀

For its 21st edition, we’re bringing together JetBrains and i2CAT, who will share use cases, insights and ideas around the technologies they’re developing.

And, as always, we’ll finish the evening with a networking session by techies, for techies: a chance to meet new people over a drink.

Speakers & Content

Beyond Adoption: What the Best Developers and Startups Do Differently With AI in 2026

The majority of developers now use AI daily, so the real question isn’t whether your team uses it, but how well. Daniil Shulgin (Country Manager, JetBrains Spain) and Natalia Kocichova (Global Head of JetBrains for Startups) turn the latest JetBrains data — worldwide, in Spain and across startups — into practical takeaways about what top teams do differently, where AI quietly costs you time, which skills are becoming critical, and how the engineer’s job is shifting from writing code to directing how it is written.

Come compare your team against the data and leave with actionable tips you can start using right away.

Flexible Payload (FP OS)

Flexible Payload (FP OS) is an in flight middleware that enables hardware reconfiguration and isolated software sandboxing in orbit. Engineered for software defined satellites in the New Space era, it offers Tier 1 integrators and operators a vendor neutral way to dynamically update and retask satellite payloads throughout their mission lifecycle.

Open event. We reserve the right of admission.

The Expansión StartUp Awards aim to recognise the work and track record of startups that have stood out in one of the established categories, with particular emphasis on innovation, the strength of their business model, their economic, social and environmental impact, scalability, achievements and future milestones, and the overall quality of the application submitted.

Deusto Emprende will shortlist four applications per category, which will then be assessed by a specialised jury. Three awards will be presented in each category. The jury will meet on November 12, 2026, and the awards ceremony will take place on December 2, 2026, in Barcelona.

Who can apply: Startups legally established in Spain —or in the process of being established— that have been operating for a maximum of 60 months from the date they registered their activity, qualify as an SME under EU regulations, and have an innovative component, although this does not necessarily have to be technological.

Companies may apply to a maximum of two categories:

• Health & Biotechnology

• Mobility & Smart Cities

• Green & Blue Economy

• Tech Industry

• Smart Services

• AgriFood Tech & Gastronomic Innovation

Applications will be open from September 10 to October 14, 2026, inclusive. Applications must be submitted through the form available on the awards’ microsite; submissions through any other channel will not be accepted.

Explore how you can enable Agentic AI driven processes with SAP Integration Suite to become the intelligent backbone of your entire DevOps and Integration lifecycle, resulting in accelerated delivery, reduced operational overhead, and continuous process optimization. Join us for an afternoon with a customer case, live demos and networking afterwards, in Barcelona (Oct 22).
For AI agents to deliver real value, they need to understand your SAP integration landscape – your flows, APIs, and business processes. Training your agent on your own business processes and integration is what turns a generic AI into a truly intelligent part of your organization.

Through real-world examples and live demos, we will showcase how we help organizations leverage AI to handle large-scale integration challenges – from high-volume incident resolution to complex migration and testing scenarios.

Learn how SAP Integration Suite and Agentic AI enable intelligent, self-optimizing DevOps and business processes across systems.
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Key use cases we’ll cover:
• AI-driven incident management and advanced error resolution at scale, reducing time to resolution
• AI as gatekeeper in DevOps: validation, governance, and code quality checks without slowing delivery
• Customer story: migrating off BizTalk onto SAP Integration Suite. Automated mapping conversion and regression testing carried the custom code and very high complexity interfaces, each one tested against its BizTalk baseline and live in production.
• Live demo of Rojo’s Migration Studio. It reads the logic inside your existing interfaces (SAP PO, Boomi, MuleSoft, BizTalk), generates the Integration Suite artefacts, converts the mappings, and regression-tests the result against the original.
• AI-powered integration flows and agent orchestration within SAP Integration Suite

Why attend:
• Learn how to increase efficiency, accelerate delivery, and reduce costs by leveraging AI capabilities within Integration Suite
• Discover how Agentic AI can transform SAP Integration Suite into an intelligent backbone for your DevOps and integration lifecycle, with live demos of the agents in a real environment
• See how much of a migration to SAP Integration Suite can be automated, mapping conversion, regression testing and where your team’s judgement is still required.
• Insights into how AI adds value on top of increasingly complex application landscapes, making your business processes smarter

Who should attend:
This event is designed for leaders who own integration strategy, architecture, and delivery, including Heads of Integration, Integration Leads, and Enterprise Integration Architects, as well as ERP Transformation Leaders and SAP S/4HANA Migration Leads driving large-scale modernization.
If you’re setting integration direction, modernizing your SAP landscape, or steering a complex migration, this evening is for you.

Please note: all registrations are pending, awaiting confirmation from Rojo.