Barcelona will host a new congress on the materials that will mark the future

John Hoffman is increasingly becoming an asset for the city of Barcelona. After betting on reactivating fair activity with the return of the Mobile World Congress (MWC), the top executive of the GSMA has played a key role in attracting a new congress to the Catalan capital. This exhibition will be called PuzzleX and aims to lead the international debate on what materials will mark the future.

This project is led by Zina Jarrahi Cinker, the general director of the Advanced Materials Future Preparedness Taskforce (AMPT), an association that was created at the beginning of the pandemic to ensure greater preparedness for the next health crisis. New materials such as graphene must serve to find solutions to the challenges to come, as well as the use of technologies such as photonics and quantum mechanics.

Within the AMPT is the GSMA, concerned about how the efficiency of the mobile industry can continue to be improved, especially with longer-lasting batteries. And when Jarrahi began to envision that she wanted to create a new global event, Hoffman defended Barcelona's candidacy, thinking that the public-private collaboration that exists in the city and its scientific and technological ecosystem could help grow such an incipient idea, which does not exist anywhere else in the world.

For Jarrahi, the Catalan capital has two virtues for choosing it: it is attractive to travel to for a congress and, especially, it is for emerging companies. In fact, startups will be essential for PuzzleX, since it has been conceived as more than just a fair. The aim is that, from the ideas that emerge during the three days of the meeting, companies will be created in Barcelona that will mark that future of new materials. To this end, it will have the collaboration of the Mobile World Capital Barcelona (MWCapital) and its incubation program The Collider.

Other PuzzleX partners will also contribute to this, such as the Consorci de la Zona Franca de Barcelona (CZFB) and the Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology (BIST), made up of seven research centers that have much to contribute to this discussion, including the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO). In fact, there are already alliances in Catalonia that want to promote these new materials, such as GraphCAT and QuantumCAT. Nor should we forget the existence of cutting-edge infrastructures such as the Alba Synchrotron which, precisely, are dedicated to researching this issue.

It will coincide with the Smart City Expo

PuzzleX will take place from November 16 to 18 at Fira Gran Via, in a still hybrid format and framed within the celebration of the Smart City Expo World Congress (SCEWC) and Tomorrow.Mobility, an event that will also debut this year.

Jarrahi emphasizes that it will not be a conventional exhibition. "We want to innovate," he defended at the presentation of the project this Thursday, held during the MWC 2021. During the first day it will be more like a TEDx Talks or a Davos Forum, with leaders and experts discussing advanced materials. Based on the ideas sown on the first day, the second will serve to let attendees conceive projects and the third for them to take shape. Once the congress is over, they will continue their journey hand in hand with MWCapital.

For this first edition, Jarrahi expects about 500 people to attend, with a very specialized profile. When the pandemic passes and fair activity is fully recovered, he foresees this figure rising to between 3,000 and 5,000 in the 2022 edition.