Moving towards a future focused on innovation and a higher quality of life
South Summit Madrid 2024 is the largest annual event in southern Europe, bringing together entrepreneurs, investors, startups and corporations from around the world. The 13th edition was held from 5 to 7 June at La Nave in Madrid, and Cinfa was an active participant.
“Human by Design” was the theme of this opportunity to dive into the future of technology, business and innovation from a human perspective, ensuring that technological evolution is aligned with improving people’s lives and advancing humanity.
Our presence at South Summit 2024
On Thursday, our Director of Innovation and Corporate Development, Julio Sánchez, participated in the panel “Innovating Health: Cutting Edge Tech for Enhanced Patient Quality of Life” along with distinguished industry peers such as Jorge Pou, Innovation & Commercial Operations Director at GSK; Carmen Ríos, Co-Founder & CEO of Doctomatic and Robert Schultz, Managing Director at Massnex.
They addressed current challenges in the development of Health Tech projects from their different perspectives and highlighted the synergy between startups, major companies and research centres as a fundamental element to continue driving innovation and improving the quality of life of patients in the field of health.
Julio Sanchez stressed that “any innovation must be initiated to address real problems and have a practical application in the real world”. He also identified two key challenges in any health system: longevity and chronicity. And hence the need to address them at every stage of the patient journey, from prevention to early diagnosis and subsequent treatment.
Another challenge mentioned in the panel was the challenges that the system and regulatory bodies pose for the development and implementation of technological solutions, which do not evolve at the same pace or quickly. As Carmen Ríos pointed out, this mainly affects small companies.
On the same day, Marta Pedrosa, Innovation Analyst at Cinfa, took part in the “Thinking Outside the Box: Open Innovation” round table with Emilio Martínez, Open Innovation & Entrepreneurship at Enagás; Luciano Felipe, Head of Strategic R&D Program at Petrobras and Fernando Sandoval, Head of Innovation Hub Europe at Enel.
During the session, they shared their experiences from the point of view of a large company that collaborates with startups and research teams, stressing firstly how open innovation is crucial to stay ahead in a constantly changing world, as it can generate innovative ideas and develop joint projects, rather than relying solely on internal resources. This approach also includes interacting with the external ecosystem, such as universities, suppliers and, of course, startups.
Within this framework, our main objective at CinfaNext is to collaborate, co-create and promote innovative health projects.
About South Summit 2024
On this occasion, this benchmark event brought together more than 18,000 attendees from 133 different countries, eight countries more than in the previous edition, underlining its profound international character.
Attendees included 6,500 entrepreneurs, who were able to make high-value connections with 6,000 corporate representatives and 2,000 investors from around the world, whose investment portfolios exceed $500 billion.
