Since Suara has received recognition as Catalonia Exponential Leader'24 by ACCIÓ, this agency of the Generalitat de Catalunya has invited the cooperative to participate in a pitch session where it will be able to present the Social Digital Lab, its social innovation laboratory.
The organization Suara Cooperativa will be present at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) with three different actions: it will offer a pitch as a leader in disruptive technology in the social field to different companies; it will present a challenge to improve the management of the home care service; and it will participate in a round table where it will present how it has implemented virtual reality in therapeutic support in homes.
The first activity will take place on March 3rd where it will offer a pitch to different companies to publicize the Social Digital Lab working methodology, which is inspired by the quadruple helix model of the European Living Labs. This is based on ensuring that in all phases of the innovation processes all the agents involved in it participate in the co-creation of the solution to a challenge: citizens, companies in the technology sector and startups, universities and research institutes and the public administration. This ensures that the technological tools developed respond to real social challenges.
This Social Digital Lab working formula is the reason why Suara has been recognized with the Catalonia Exponential Leader'24 seal from ACCIÓ, which accredits it as one of the ten leading companies in disruptive technology in Catalonia. For this reason, in this edition of the MWC it will participate in a pitch space that ACCIÓ has organized so that companies that have obtained this certification can publicize their projects to a diverse audience.
“There will be representatives from organizations that, like us, have received the seal this year, those that aspire to obtain it in 2025 and Suara serves as a source of inspiration for them, as well as people interested in the working methodology of the living labs or in creating alliances with us”, explains Clara Garcia, head of pilot tests at Suara Cooperativa.
Presentation of a challenge
In addition, Suara Cooperativa will present a challenge to the ACCIÓ Open Innovation Challenge to improve the management of the home care service. As a result of this, they will have a space where they can meet with companies in the technology sector to learn about their solutions and see if they meet their challenge. As part of this, it is planned that they will be able to meet with a total of fifteen companies during the MWC.
However, the innovation team will also visit different stands to learn about the latest developments in the sector to see if they offer a solution to this challenge or others that the cooperative may have in its services where it accompanies people from all walks of life.
Finally, the Taula del Tercer Sector, through m4Social, together with the Mobile World Capital Barcelona Foundation and the European Social Network, will organize the round table “For full sociodigital inclusion” on March 6, in which Bàrbara Ouiterio, head of Open Innovation at Suara, will present how Suara has implemented virtual reality in home care services.
Through the “Therapeutic accompaniment at home” project, this technology has been used to work through different stimuli on the cognitive and physical skills of people with a certain degree of dependency. In addition, in her speech, Outeiro will also emphasize how family workers have been trained to use this tool in the homes where they offer their services, focusing on the digital divide as a transversal axis of the innovation carried out.
“At Suara we have turned care workers into technological facilitators so that they can implement virtual reality in the accompaniment of the people they care for to improve their emotional, cognitive and physical well-being”, argues Outeiro.
This is not the first time that Suara Cooperativa has attended the Mobile World Congress, where for several years it has presented several challenges or its own projects linked to social innovation.
Participation in events like this allows Suara to carry out scouting processes to learn about the latest technological developments to explore how they could be implemented to improve its services. In this context, a month ago, it attended Integrated System Europe (ISE) where, also with ACCIÓ, it presented a challenge to develop a Digital Twin technology that allows analyzing a large number of data to generate future scenarios and be able to act on a possible problem in a preventive and non-reactive manner.
