The CLH Group and ADE sign an agreement to promote entrepreneurship in Castile-León
- The company will award prizes for the four best entrepreneurial initiatives of the ADE2020 project accelerator in 2014
The CLH Group has signed an agreement with the Agency for Business Innovation, Funding and Internationalisation of Castile-León (ADE), an institution that operates under the Regional Ministry of Economy and Employment, for the purpose of promoting and developing initiatives that provide support to entrepreneurs in the region.
The aim of the agreement, which was signed today in Valladolid by the Chairman of CLH, José Luis López de Silanes, and the Chairman of ADE who is also the Minister for Economy and Employment in the Regional Government of Castile-León, Tomás Villanueva, is to establish the framework for an effective collaboration between the CLH Group and ADE for developing the ADE2020 "Innovative Projects Accelerator" programme in 2014.
By means of this agreement, the company undertakes to award prizes for the two most remarkable projects selected in each of the two editions of the ADE2020 awards held in 2014, and also to arrange meetings between the entrepreneurs participating in each edition so they can exchange experiences.
The ADE2020 "Innovative Projects Accelerator" programme is an ADE initiative that brings together a set of resources and services aimed at selected innovative entrepreneurial projects, with the aim of transforming them into viable businesses in the shortest possible space of time. To achieve this, the accelerator offers entrepreneurs a team of top level professionals who provide a personal coaching service for drawing up the business plan and its deployment. It also includes education and training in specific areas, including financial advice and intermediation on financial matters and technical and management infrastructures.
This collaboration between the CLH Group and ADE falls within the Entrepreneurship Support Policy started up by the company to contribute to innovation, the development of new ideas and, in general, 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 sponsored the 2nd Entrepreneurship Campus in San Fernando de Henares, has collaborated with Madrid's Carlos III University in the 1st Meeting of Entrepreneur Alumni and has signed an agreement with Campus Iberus for promoting entrepreneurship in the Ebro Valley.
These and other courses of action have led to the CLH Group being awarded the "Strategy for Entrepreneurship and Youth Employment Member Company 2013-2016" seal, which is granted by the Ministry of Employment and Social Security.
Prizewinners
The CLH Group has already selected its first two prizewinners from among this year's ADE2020 accelerator initiatives: they are the INTELNICS (Salamanca) and MEDERNOVA (Valladolid) projects.
INTELNICS is the project undertaken by Roberto López González and Ismael Santana Ramos, two entrepreneurs from Salamanca with a long professional career, who have proposed the development of artificial intelligence programmes with applications in biotechnology, engineering and finance. It is all about using information in the form of data to generate knowledge in the form of models through the use of neural network techniques. On a practical level and among other things, Intelnics can be used for making non-invasive diagnoses of cancer, reducing fuel consumption in aircraft, analysing the properties of concrete, improving the quality of wine, forecasting forest fires or forecasting sales in hypermarkets.
The other project singled out by CLH is MEDERNOVA, an excellent example of serial entrepreneurship. Víctor Ortega, Sergio Morales and José Antonio Gallego, its three promoters, address Medernova as a spin-off from the Five Flames Mobile company they created in 2012. The origin of this second business project is the product of the collaboration effort between the entrepreneurs and the University of Valladolid's Biomedical Research Group (GIB), in which both parties worked together in developing software that can be used to help in diagnosing sleep apnoea/hypopnoea syndrome (SAHS). The method is based on analysing the patient's oxymetry signal record by means of a simple, very low cost portable device that the patient can use unaided in his own home.