Santalucía Impulsa Empleados kicks off its 7th edition

Santalucía Impulses Employees is the company's entrepreneurship program, and last Tuesday, February 11, it kicked off with a first face-to-face presentation session.

As every year, the program consists of the development by the employees of the different companies of the Santalucía Group of a solution for a challenge proposed by the company. Intrapreneurs apply for application, a selection is made, the participants are divided into teams and each of them is assigned a challenge, accompanied throughout the process by innovation mentors.

Presentation of the new edition of Santalucía Impulsa Empleados

Unlike last year, this time, the first session that began the program was in person. We brought together all the participants in the LAB so that they could get to know each other, to introduce them to the program and to assign them the challenge they will have to work on over the next few months.

Ángel Uzquiza, Director of Corporate Innovation, and Rubén Muñoz Fernández, General Director of Technology and Operations at Santalucía Seguros, welcomed the 21 participants and the innovation mentors.

Thereafter, Jorge Millán-Astray, coordinator of Santalucía Impulsa, and Beatriz Mengual Rodríguez, from the HR team, spoke of their experience in the difficult selection of entrepeneurs. In total, there were more than 100 registrations from all over Grupo Santalucía, 40 interviews were conducted, and finally 21 entrepreneurs were selected. These people have an entrepreneurial spirit and want to develop their skills in the selected projects with the help of the best professionals.

The next step was key in this face-to-face session: the presentation of all the entrepreneurs so that they could get to know each other. Using a ball as a means to take the floor, everyone introduced themselves with their name, company, job or specialty and an interesting fact about each one. Here we were able to discover many skills, interests and hobbies that, in addition, will serve many to get along and to strengthen ties.

Real testimony of an entrepreneur from Santalucía Impulsa Empleados

During the day we have the participation of Rocío Santos, who came to tell the new entrepreneurs about his experience in the program the previous year. Rocío and his team developed Dr. House, a project which led them to victory.

Rocío spoke about how her career began in the program, how they proposed the solution to the challenge that was proposed to them, how they faced teamwork with people who work in different fields but who pursue a common goal, and how Santalucía Impulsa Empleados had meant an improvement for her both in the professional and personal spheres.

Santalucía Impulsa's corporate innovation and business model

Ángel Uzquiza presented the the company's corporate innovation model and the Santalucía Impulsa business model, essential to understand the origin and objectives of the intrudence program.

The mission, where we want to go with this model, is promote Innovation as a key lever for transformation in the Santalucía Group, fostering an entrepreneurial ecosystem and a model of internal and external collaboration. And this is achieved through the development of internal innovation projects, the testing of external innovation opportunities that fit within the Group or the development of strategic alliances in innovation with other external ecosystems.

The result of all this, if we consider together the programs of Santalucía Boosts Employees, Startups and Universities, are as follows:

· + 3,000 entrepreneurs contacted.

· + 2,000 projects analyzed.

· 71 accelerated and incubated projects.

· + 2M € in brand value.

· 24.3 M € of funding raised by startups.

· + 17,000 followers on social networks.

· 165 entrepeneurs.

· 30 have been incubated.

Teamlabs, partner of Santalucía Impulsa Empleados

Then it was the turn of Javi Larrea, from TeamLabs, a regular collaborator who will guide teams in every step they take in their projects.

Specifically, Teamlabs accompanies the teams that make up the program in their innovation process through a Design Sprint, an agile methodology with five key phases: understanding, diverging, deciding, prototyping and validating.

In addition, as a novelty this year, they have incorporated competency mapping to measure the personal and professional growth of the participants, which reinforces their commitment to the development of talent within organizations.

The professionals of the TeamLabs team who will accompany the entrepreneurs in this challenge, in addition to Javier Larrea, will be Humberto Matas, Irati Lekue, Lara Larrañaga Salegi and Idaira González Petit, who will deliver the training sessions in each of the five modules mentioned above.

7th edition of Santalucía Impulses Employees

The last (and most anticipated) part of the day was the presentation of the program and the assignment of teams and challenges. Ángel Uzquiza directed this presentation, detailing the benefits offered by the program for the entrepreneurs participating this year:

· Program of project incubation and skill development female entrepreneurs.

· Access to the second phase of acceleration of the Santalucía Group for the best teams, who will be able to validate and build their solution.

· Immersion and learning in agile innovation methodologies (such as Design Thinking or the Double Diamond method), accompanied by the best experts.

· Talent recognition and award for the best team and for the best entrepreneur.

Finally, the challenges were assigned to each of the teams, made up of innovation mentors from Santalucía Seguros, Iris Global and Unicorp Vida, and 7 entrepreneurs.

The challenges posed in this new edition of Santalucía Impulsa Empleados are: HOME, FINANCE AND SENIORS.

From now on, the incubation phase begins, which will end in May 2025. Until then, we conclude with a quote from Henry Ford:

“Meeting is a beginning, staying together is progress, working together is success”.