Cisco Opens Latest Co-Innovation Center in Barcelona

Set in one of the most creative, smart, and attractive cities, we launched the official opening this evening of Cisco’s Barcelona Co-Innovation Center, the latest addition to our global network of 12 Co-Innovation centers worldwide. Like all our centers, this one will serve as a local hive of innovative activity for open, collaboration to co-develop digital solutions with customers and partners.

Tonight, building on Cisco’s legacy of smart-city technology projects in Barcelona, we were delighted to welcome more than 150 customers and partners in the region, demonstrating breakthroughs from other centers. Many who attended will join us over the long term to identify, prioritize, and co-develop new technologies, solutions, and business models.

Our ultimate aim here—as in all our Co-innovation centers—is to accelerate business growth and social good in the digital era together with our ecosystem.

From Cisco, L to R: Xavier Azemar, Lead for Barcelona Co-Innovation Center; Maciej Kranz, VP, Strategic Innovation; Xavier Massa, Director, Public Sector-Spain; Antonio Conde, Director, Digital Transformation-Spain

I am also pleased to share that the Barcelona Co-Innovation Center will be headed by Xavier Azemar, a long-time Cisco technical and business leader with career experience throughout the EMEAR region.

As Xavier stated, “Developing innovative solutions and opening new markets is crucial for maintaining Spain’s digitization competitive edge. Cisco Barcelona Co-Innovation Center brings together partners of all sizes, shapes, and forms to push forward game-changing ideas, ignite disruptive innovation, and create more value for everyone. It will be a key pillar to promote economic development and social well-being through innovative solutions for many industries, such as education, healthcare, finance, transport, or energy management efficiency.”

The Center will operate as part of the wider Cisco Co-Innovation network, which includes locations in Berlin, Paris, London, Manchester, Istanbul, Dubai, Milan, Rio de Janeiro, Toronto, Tokyo, Sydney-Perth.  Driven by Cisco’s Chief Technology and Architecture Office, digital solutions developed locally can be scaled globally across a wide range of applications. The center will also serve as a launch pad in Spain to:

• Educate, mentor, and develop talent in Spain around innovation best practices, ecosystem
• partnerships, and STEM disciplines.
• Foster local and global innovation by investing and partnering with government, start-ups, entrepreneurs, universities, and researchers
• Provide physical and virtual laboratories for proof-of-concept development, experimentation, and testing on Cisco’s open digital platform
• Provide customer innovation rooms equipped with technology tools to co-create and prototype new solutions
• Provide access to a global network to scale ideas, share success stories, best practices, and market expertise
• Demonstrate cutting-edge technology solutions and share Cisco’s insights.

The Barcelona Co-Innovation Center will also connect promising startups and portfolio companies with Cisco DevNet, a platform with more than 500,000 developers that allows network engineers and developers to learn and code, connect with other engineers and test the applications they are building in different areas such as smart cities, manufacturing, retail, utilities, or cyber-security.

Innovation, especially when done together with a world-class ecosystem, really has no boundaries – either of geography or imagination.  I know amazing solutions for a future of goodness for everyone will begin emerging soon from the Co-Innovation Center in Barcelona.

This article originally appeared in Cisco Blogs on June 28, 2019

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