The 'startups' will set up in the Olympic Stadium in spring 2023

The sportech technology business incubator that the Barcelona City Council has projected in the Estadi Olímpic Lluís Companys is finalizing its setup. Works to enable the space, with a total area of 1,100 square meters, began in summer and the facility is expected to be ready by spring 2023. It will have capacity to host up to 14 startups, all of them related to the sports, innovation, and technology sector. This initiative will be the first piece of the Barcelona Sports Hub that the council is promoting to turn the city into an international benchmark in this emerging sector and which will be headquartered in the Municipal Sports Palace.

With a budget of 2.8 million euros, the works in the Estadi Olímpic will serve to adapt an old office area located on the south facade. There will be a large coworking space and 14 interconnected work modules, as well as meeting rooms and common use spaces for the participating companies. Access will be independent of the stadium and will have parking. Just in front of the old offices, 400 square meters will be enabled outdoors, where companies will have a green area to organize meetings and outdoor co-creation activities.

B:SM, promoter of the initiative in collaboration with Barcelona Activa and the Institut Barcelona Esports, will launch a tender this month to award the management and revitalization of the space. The chosen company will be responsible for attracting the emerging companies that will participate in the incubator, as well as managing the day-to-day and promoting the space to seek investment and talent.

Participating startups will have access to accompaniment and acceleration programs. The incubator will also serve to develop proof of concepts, both in the facilities themselves and in the rest of the Olympic Ring facilities, and will offer training courses open to the general public or the sector.

The sportech incubator will seek to restore the shine to an Olympic infrastructure that has been fading over time. The icon of Barcelona 1992 has never quite found its role in the city, especially after Espanyol stopped playing there and the attempt to revitalize it through a sports theme park failed. Beyond the Festa dels Súpers and concerts, the Estadi Olímpic is usually empty. Now, the incubator and the arrival of Barça for the 2023/24 season will mark a new stage.

A new governance model for Montjuïc

The deterioration that occurs in the Estadi Olímpic is not exclusively limited to this facility, but is manifested in other spaces in Montjuïc, as well as on the mountain itself, as exposed this Friday by actors who coexist in this area, such as the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, the Fundació Joan Miró, the Montjuïc Castle and the Institut Barcelona Esports.

The session, organized by Foment del Treball and the Barcelona School of Tourism, Hospitality and Gastronomy (CETT), insisted on the need to "make Montjuïc part of the city," as defended by the director of the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, Pepe Serra. "We turn our back on it as we did on the beach," lamented the president of the Miró Foundation, Sara Puig. Serra hopes that the modernization of the Plaza Espanya fairgrounds, as well as the expansion of the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya itself, will be a "trigger" to fully integrate the mountain into the life of the Catalan capital.

To this end, the president of the Miró Foundation called for "making it easy" to get to the different museums and facilities in Montjuïc. Puig also asked to invest in "common sense" strategies such as lighting, security, and signage of the routes. Likewise, the president of Advanced Leisure Services, manager of Montjuïc Castle, advocated developing a specific governance model for the mountain and the different actors, taking into account the specific characteristics of the space, mostly natural, and the different interests at play, both of the present facilities and of the residents and tourists.