Services

The U-Talent-Hub actively promote the creation of a business network linked to the University. This will facilitate the transfer of knowledge from the research groups of the University to companies and society in general.

U-Talent-Hub consists of all companies in the Science Park Salamanca, entrepreneurs of the University and all those companies that devote part of their resources to research and / or innovation, regardless of their size, to collaborate with the University . They may also be associated with this initiative government and public or private foundations who wish to conduct research and transfer by the USAL.

U-Talent-Hub drives outreach, training and promotion of research among its members in order to create an open ecosystem of knowledge, from which all members of Hub benefit.

The University of Salamanca and the Science Park will actively enhance all activities aimed at supporting entrepreneurs and will support the development of enterprises through counselling, training and management spaces.

To that end, U-Talent-Hub will offer two main services as an Internet Innovation Hub aimed to help entrepreneurs, domain stakeholders and technology innovators to build businesses based on Internet technologies. One of these is the “Business Incubation” service which gathers several activities to focus on providing assistance to those actors interested in bringing innovative solutions to the internet. The other set of activities are part of the “Business Accelerator” service. These services include several activities that provide assistance and tools to consolidate the companies settled in the Science Park of Salamanca.

Business INCUBATION: support to entrepreneurs

The activities that will be carried out by the U-Talent-Hub to help entrepreneurs and startups are:

• Training with MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), workshops, business and administration management, Master’s degree programmes (Internet of things, Smart cities), etc. U-Talent-Hub along with the SPS will create a significantly large library of relevant training and educational materials, freely distributed under a Creative Commons (CC) license. This library will primarily consist of video content and content produced by the activities carried out by the U-Talent-Hub (e.g. video talks & workshops, interviews with invited speakers, etc.).
• Counselling for business development and coaching for products and services demanded by potential customers. The objective is to build an activity where open innovation should be promoted and working on radical ideas could begin.
• Dissemination of results and advice on marketing strategies.
• Roadshows (exposure to investors): The main purpose of such innovative activity is to allow startups to join and feel a part of the internet innovation ecosystem, feeling that they can take advantage of those tools. This will give selected startups the advantage of being “European Startups”.
• Hackathons: Hackathons will be organized to achieve not only a strong showing of local technical talent, but also at a national and EU-wide level; individuals who during a period of approximately 48 hours will come together and form small teams collaborating on projects development .
• Workshops for Prospective web entrepreneurs, innovators and developers: The aim of these workshops is to stimulate and inspire these regional actors to become successful web entrepreneurs, encouraging them to start their own business in the Internet of innovation and “dispel the fear of failure”.

Business ACCELERATION: support to companies

These services provided by U-Talent-Hub aims to foster the consolidation of companies and improve their position in local, regional and international markets. To achieve this, there will be internationalization forums and special attention will be given to “cross-border mentorship”.

• Support for business internationalization (the internationalization Forum)
• Counselling on business management, legal and fiscal advice
• Cross-border mentorship: Development of exchange programmes. The knowledge and expertise will be provided by specialized mentors in fields from the other local ecosystems.
• Spaces for meet-ups with investors and startups: U-Talent-Hub with help of SPS services and spaces aims to create a meeting place for more than 120 late stage startups and stakeholders looking to share experiences among the Internet innovation landscape, and foster synergies among members. U-Talent-Hub accelerator will organize at least two meet-ups, including regular "Speed Dating" and afterwork “online” events.
• Fiscal and Employees assessment and management
• Accountancy and commercial assessment and management
• Preferred access and best economic support services for research at the University of Salamanca (http://nucleus.usal.es/).

Other services

Finally, the U-Talent-Hub can benefit of Science Park of Salamanca (SPS) main services:

• International Tenders Service
• Research Support Services (Nucleus)
• Data-Processing Facility (DPF): Housing and Hosting
• Training Service
• The experimental greenhouse Service