•Notícia

A candidature led by the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) and ESADE Business School has been selected following a European call for proposals to launch a major project aimed at stimulating innovation in the field of sustainable energy.

The project, known as InnoEnergy, will entail an initial investment of €450 million over the next four years. The initiative is supported by the recently created European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT). The EIT was set up on the model of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States, renowned as a world leader in innovation.

The EIT, whose aim is to achieve greater integration of universities, companies and research centers, issued a call for proposals to create three pan-European Knowledge and Innovation Communities (KICs). InnoEnergy will be the sustainable energy KIC. The other two will focus on the information society and climate change.

 

The two lead institutions submitted their proposal in collaboration with the energy sector companies Gas Natural–Unión Fenosa, Iberdrola, EDF, Vatenfall, ABB and Total. Other partners involved in designing the candidature were the Royal Institute of Technology of Stockholm (Sweden), the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Germany), the Catalonia Institute for Energy Research (IREC), the Energy, Environment and Technology Research Center (CIEMAT), and the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA). A total of 35 universities, companies and research centers are partners in the InnoEnergy project.

The goal for the first four years is to train over 1500 students in specific international programs aimed at producing technology leaders with a strong entrepreneurial culture, create more than 60 new patents, and launch over 50 startups. It is also anticipated that 90 new products will be put on the market in the first four years that the project is underway. The project will run until 2017.

InnoEnergy will have six operational centers located in Barcelona, Stockholm, Karlsruhe, Grenoble, Eindhoven and Krakow. These centers will be responsible for coordinating various subthemes related to sustainable energy.

The Spanish center of operations, known as Co-Location Center Iberia, will be based in Barcelona. The Center will bring together Spanish and Portuguese partners and coordinate all the InnoEnergy projects that focus on renewable energies (wind, solar photovoltaic, solar thermal, and marine energy). It will also coordinate a large-scale project on industrial energy efficiency.

In addition to the UPC and the ESADE Business School, the other main partners involved in the Barcelona center are FENOSA, IREC, CIEMAT and the Portuguese university IST. Associated partners who have joined the initial group are Tecnalia, Alstom-Ecotècnia, Galp Energía, EdP and Agbar. In the future it is expected that other key Spanish companies in the sector and SMEs specializing in the renewable energy field will also come on board.

From the Co-Location Center Iberia, located at the new Diagonal Besòs Campus in Barcelona, the UPC will coordinate renewable energy research projects with the support of the IREC. The role of the ESADE Business School will be to focus on turning innovation into business and entrepreneurial opportunities. The UPC and ESADE will work together to create a support infrastructure for the Spanish partners involved.

ESADE will be the benchmark business school for KIC InnoEnergy as a whole and home to the ESADE CREAPOLIS Innovation Park, which will foster excellence, networking, and collaborative innovation among the six European co-location centers.

 

Though they are distributed throughout Europe and act independently, the KICs will now become the operational part of the EIT. The KICs are the first and most critical step towards the full development of the recently created institute. With the establishment of the KICs, leading universities, companies and research centers will for the first time work together with the aim of generating the critical mass needed to achieve excellence in innovation.

“The UPC is proud to be coordinating the Co-Location Center Iberia as part of such a significant initiative as KIC InnoEnergy. With support from education and research, the project will have a major impact in the European energy sector and drive innovation,” says Josep Bordonau, professor of electronic engineering at the School of Industrial Engineering of Barcelona (ETSEIB) and the UPC’s InnoEnergy coordinator.

“Europe needs to demonstrate that it can excel in creating new knowledge,” says Elena Bou, a professor in ESADE’s Department of Operations Management and Innovation and one of the project researchers, together with Professor Bordonau. “Despite everything, Europe hasn’t yet been able to translate knowledge into tangible assets, that is to say, into innovation.”
 

In this call for proposals, the EIT has chosen the project Climate-KIC as the Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation KIC and the project EIT ICT Labs as the Future Information and Communication Society KIC. In the latter category, the UPC submitted the project TRANSFICS, which has been chosen as a finalist; it has therefore been designated a KIC in recognition of the quality of its research, although there is no financial award.

The UPC is a public institution for research and higher education that specializes in engineering, architecture, and the sciences. The UPC is a benchmark institution that is internationally recognized for the quality of its research and educational programs. The University—which encompasses 10 university campuses in eight Catalan localities, 24 schools and faculties, 40 departments, and 97 research centers—teaches 26 undergraduate programs and 58 university master’s degrees within the framework of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). Forty-seven doctoral programs are also taught. The UPC is the Spanish university with the most strategic research projects funded under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme and the university that offers the most international master’s programs recognized by the EU. In 2008 the University earned €75 million in revenue from its research, development and technology transfer activities. In the same year, the UPC obtained 74 patents, 23 of them international.

Founded in 1958, ESADE has campuses in Barcelona, Madrid and Buenos Aires, and has established collaboration agreements with over 100 universities and business schools worldwide. Each year over 10,000 students participate in the School’s executive education and MBA programs or study in its undergraduate, doctoral and MSc programs in law and business administration and management. ESADE, an institution with a clear international orientation, was recognized by the Wall Street Journal as the top business school in its international ranking. The School currently has a network of 38,000 alumni who hold positions of responsibility in enterprises around the globe.