The mayor of Santa Marta, David Mingo, and the president of the AIR Institute Foundation, Juan Manuel Corchado, presented the basic data and technical details of the project of the entrepreneurship center to be built on Avenida de la Serna, which will be managed and coordinated by this foundation. A project that is led by the Town Council and that will be executed thanks to a million euro grant from the Junta de Castilla y León and the Provincial Council of Salamanca.

David Mingo and Juan Manuel Corchado with a report from the Entrepreneurship Center.

Last Wednesday, the Minister of Economy and Finance, Carlos Fernandez Carriedo, went to Santa Marta to sign the protocol and formalize the commitment of the Board for an initiative that will turn Santa Marta into a benchmark town in terms of technological development, promoting the creation of jobs linked to new technologies.

The future entrepreneurship center or business incubator of Santa Marta will be located on a plot of land that has a total area of 8,345 m2, where a sports center will also be built. The building, with a first floor and a height of 4.8 meters, will initially occupy an area of 713 m2, since this project only involves the construction of one of the three planned development units, which will be expanded depending on the availability of resources and future space requirements.

These units will be interconnected and have been conceived to enable the development of open innovation strategies in a coworking space, a space for business acceleration and a space for the implementation of consolidated companies.

In this first phase of the project, the coworking space will be implemented, focused on the development of entrepreneurship, where the foundations will also be laid for the attraction of consolidated companies that, in the future, will have their own space.

“It will be a unique infrastructure in the region and hopefully, thanks to everyone’s work, it will become a benchmark for progress, innovation and cutting-edge technology. It is a project that has emerged to drive the transformation of Santa Marta, to promote projects that bring it closer to the rest of Smart Cities that are being developed both in Spain and internationally”, explained Juan Manuel Corchado, who added that “it is a project that will strengthen the existing business, cultural and social fabric in Santa Marta and its surroundings and will be a source of skilled employment and generation of talent related to new technologies in areas such as cybersecurity or what we know as the internet of things”. 

AIR Institute is the technological institution from which the activity of the future entrepreneurship center will be coordinated, promoting activities and deploying the necessary means to generate open innovation processes that facilitate entrepreneurship, the acceleration and attraction of companies and the development of activities that have an impact on the society of Santa Marta and its surroundings.

As for the technical characteristics of this first module, resistant materials will be used in the construction of the building; ones that require little maintenance and guarantee the durability of the building, which will also be positioned in such a way that it will receive the early rays of sunlight to heat and illuminate the environment, thus substantially reducing energy consumption.

An open space that in this first phase will be the center of operations to work with companies already consolidated in Salamanca, as well as to attract wealth, culture and knowledge to Santa Marta, a municipality that will contribute to this project its human capital and its environment, as well as its proximity and links to the two universities in Salamanca.

In addition, the geographical location of Santa Marta is the most suitable for attracting companies, due to its proximity to the capital of the province and its good communication with Madrid, and the location of its headquarters is ideal as it is in the city center, well connected by public transport, close to a shopping center and with parking available for hundreds of vehicles. 

We would like to thank the media that have echoed this news:

Posted by Juan M. Corchado

Juan Manuel Corchado (15 May 1971, Salamanca, Spain) is Professor at the University of Salamanca. He has been Vice-Rector for Research from 2013 to 2017 and Director of the Science Park of the University of Salamanca. Elected as Dean of the Faculty of Science twice, he holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Salamanca and a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of the West of Scotland. He leads the renowned BISITE (Bioinformatics, Intelligent Systems and Educational Technology) Research Group, created in 2000. Director of the IoT Digital Innovation Hub and President of the AIR Institute, J. M. Corchado is also Visiting Professor at the Osaka Institute of Technology since January 2015, Visiting Professor at the Universiti Malaysia Kelantan and Member of the Advisory Group on Online Terrorist Propaganda of the European Counter Terrorism Centre (EUROPOL). J. M. Corchado has been president of the IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society, and academic coordinator of the University Institute for Research in Art and Animation Technology at the University of Salamanca, as well as researcher at the Universities of Paisley (UK), Vigo (Spain) and the Plymouth Marine Laboratory (UK). He currently combines all his activity with the direction of Master programmes in Security, Digital Animation, Mobile Telephony, Information Systems Management, Internet of Things, Social Media, 3D Design and Printing, Blockchain, Z System, Industry 4.0, Agile Project Management, and Smart Cities & Intelligent Buildings, at the University of Salamanca and his work as editor-in-chief of the journals ADCAIJ (Advances in Distributed Computing and Artificial Intelligence Journal), OJCST (Oriental Journal of Computer Science and Technology) or Electronics MDPI (Computer Science & Engineering section). J. M. Corchado mainly works on projects related to Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Blockchain, IoT, Fog Computing, Edge Computing, Smart Cities, Smart Grids and Sentiment Analysis. He has recently been included in the board of trustees of the AstraZeneca Foundation, along with other health professionals and researchers recognised for bringing scientific knowledge closer to society.

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