María Jesús Montero, First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance, visited Eurecat’s facilities in Cerdanyola del Vallès today where she underscored the technology centre’s role in driving business innovation, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises, to unlock their capacity for growth, internationalisation and opening up new markets.
The First Deputy Prime Minister was accompanied by Carlos Pietro, the Spanish Government representative in Catalonia; Carlos Cordón, the town’s mayor; Daniel Altimiras, chair of Eurecat; Xavier López, Eurecat’s Chief Operating and Corporate Officer; Miquel Rey, Eurecat’s Corporate Director of Business Development; Myriam García-Berro, Eurecat’s Technology director, and other officers at the centre.
“Catalonia has always been a driving force for innovation in Spain as a whole and the business sector in this region has set the standard in many areas for the rest of Spain,” commented Montero. “Hence we are visiting all these initiatives to learn from them, share them with other parts of our country and encourage the private sector to come together around these types of ideas so that we can all team up and help each other.”
During her visit, the First Deputy Prime Minister was shown several groundbreaking projects in cognitive and social robotics by Daniel Serrano, Eurecat’s Director of Robotics, and the innovations in the Digital Area by its Director, Lali Soler.
She also toured the laboratory of the Ultrasion spinoff where Xavier Plantà, director of Eurecat’s Industrial Area, and Irene Ràfols, director of Product Innovation, briefed her on advances in semiconductors and microelectronics.
Miquel Rovira, director of the centre’s Sustainability Area, spoke about Eurecat’s projects in industrial decarbonisation and batteries while Paul Lacharmoise, director of Functional Printing and Embedded Systems, shared progress in plastronics at the technology centre and also presented the innovations underway in the injection moulding laboratory.
