The CLH Group and ADE award the best innovative projects of Castilla y León

• The company rewards the DÓNATE and SRS Ingeniería initiatives

The chairman of the CLH Group, José Luis López de Silanes, and the Vice-minister of Economy and Competitiveness of the regional government of Castilla y León, Carlos Martín Tobalina, have presented the Sixth Edition of the CLH Awards to the two best business projects of the ADE2020 Programme.

The winners are DÓNATE, a project promoted by a group of professionals in Soria looking to facilitate the management of blood donations through a computer application; and SRS Ingeniería, an initiative of several partners in Valladolid which makes it possible to improve energy efficiency in thermal installations for heating and domestic hot water.

The ADE2020 “Innovative project accelerator” programme is an ADE (Agency for Business Innovation, Funding and Internationalisation of Castilla y León) initiative aimed at making it possible for innovative ideas to become viable businesses in the shortest possible space of time. To achieve this, the accelerator offers entrepreneurs a team of professionals who provide a coaching service for the drawing up and deployment of the business plan. It also includes education and training in specific areas.

The CLH Group and ADE have had a collaboration agreement in place since 2014, enabling the company to award the most unique projects over the last five editions of the ADE2020 programme.

Entrepreneurship Support Policy

This agreement falls within the company’s Entrepreneurship Support Policy to contribute to the development of innovative projects and to fostering a new spirit of entrepreneurship. This policy is applied on a nation-wide scale, with special emphasis on the towns where CLH has infrastructures.

Within this policy, the company has signed agreements to promote entrepreneurship with several institutions, such as the Campus Iberus, an entity comprising the main universities in the Ebro Valley; the Promotion Institute of the Region of Murcia; the San Fernando de Henares local authority and Madrid's Carlos III University.

These and other courses of action have led to the CLH Group being awarded the "Youth Entrepreneurship and Employment Strategy Member Company 2013-2016" seal, which is granted by the Ministry of Employment and Social Security.

Prize-winners

The first project awarded is DÓNATE, an initiative that proposes the creation of a multiplatform application to promote and manage blood donations using a donor QR code. This project offers several advantages, such as the creation of a unified donor database and the elimination of interregional and international barriers, as well as enabling health centres to contact donors directly through a chat application.

This initiative is supported by the Spanish Federation of Blood Donors. Several health centres have requested to join the project and it has attracted interest in surrounding countries.

The second project is SRS Ingeniería, an initiative that makes it possible to improve the energy efficiency of thermal installations for heating and hot water. For this purpose, the promoters have developed a large, sophisticated stratification system that controls heat differences according to demand and timetables, implementing the relevant corrective actions and increasing installation performance.

Potential users of this project include homeowners’ associations with shared central heating, and the geriatric or sports sectors.