Enric Asunción, from Wallbox; Josep Fajula, from OCA Global, and Pau Sarsanedas, from GPAInnova, are the three finalists who choose to win the Young Entrepreneur Award organized by AIJEC, the Association of Young Entrepreneurs of Catalonia. This is one of the most important awards for entrepreneurship held in Catalonia and with which AIJEC Joves Empresaris wants to distinguish the work, effort and perseverance of young entrepreneurs capable of generating jobs and promoting business projects.
In the category of Best Business Initiative, the three projects that choose to win the award that recognizes the most innovative business idea with future prospects are Meeting Lawyers, Rokubun and Blue Box. The awards reach their 28th edition this year.
Estefania González Campins, vice-president of AIJEC Young Entrepreneurs and head of the Young Entrepreneur Award jury, highlights the high level of the candidates and the difficulties encountered by the commission in charge of selecting the finalists. “Every year we have it more difficult to choose the finalist companies and that is good for the level of the award and, above all, for society.”
The finalists in the Young Entrepreneur Award
Enric Asunción is the co-founder of Wallbox, a leading provider of electric vehicle charging and energy management solutions worldwide. The company operates from Barcelona and has also opened offices in China and the United States. Wallbox chargers are sold in nearly eighty countries
Josep Fajula is CEO of the family business OCA Global, specialized in industrial inspection and certification. The group has subsidiaries in fifteen countries and has 2,400 direct employees and a thousand external collaborators who provide services to nearly a hundred countries. The company plans to close 2021 with sales of more than 100 million euros, figures that represent a growth of 25% compared to 2019.
Pau Sarsanedas i Millet is co-founder and CEO of GPAInnova, a multinational in the technology sector born in 2013 in Barcelona, made up of several companies and with multiple lines of business (metal surface treatment solutions, medical devices, naval robotics and unmanned vehicles). , power electronics and industrial adhesives). Currently, the activity revolves around mechanical and electronic engineering.
Finalists Award for Best Business Initiative
Meeting Lawyers is an online legal advice platform that wants to digitize access to legal guidance. Through an app, users can instantly make any type of query to lawyers specialized in different areas of law. Co-created by Claudia Pierre Trias de Bes, Meeting Lawyers makes its platform available to large companies from various sectors that want to provide added value to their clients or employees as an unparalleled user experience.
Rokubun develops solutions for precision navigation (geolocation) for different markets. The main product of the brand created by Xavier Banqué is JASON, a new concept called Positioning-as-a-Service, which consists of providing a precision geolocation information service to the cloud at low cost, which allows users to optimize their scalable operations.
Blue Box is a biomedical device inspired by the olfactory system and olfactory neurons of a dog and developed with artificial intelligence to detect breast cancer at home, non-invasively and only from a urine sample. The ingenuity of Judit Giró wants to offer better health care to women around the world and contribute a new grain of sand in the fight against breast cancer.
Apart from the two main awards, the AIJEC also rewards the Recognition for the Best Business Career, which the association awards annually to a consolidated businessperson to distinguish his or her career; the Recognition of Business Linguistic Quality, for a positive promotion of the use of the Catalan language in business as a tool for qualitative improvement; the Social Entrepreneur Recognition and the Futur Jove Empresari award that wants to reward an entrepreneurial project worked by people under 18 years of age.
Winners will be announced at a gala this fall. For Ruben Sans Solsona, president of AIJEC Young Entrepreneurs, “with this award AIJEC Young Entrepreneurs fulfills one of its main reasons for being: to continue supporting entrepreneurial talent and companies that work every day to carve out a hole in the business ecosystem”.