Awarded for being entrepreneur

Arantza Arruti Leave a comment

On 26 January 2023, the prizes awarded as a result of the competition held during the Deusto Emprende week at the University of Deusto (UD) were presented. These prizes, promoted by the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Unit of the UD and Banco Santander through Santander Universities, were an important incentive to “provoke” the participation of students from the different campuses of the UD in activities related to entrepreneurship.

Although there were many of us who participated in the competition, there were not so many winners. The important thing is that, once again, thanks to the celebration of Deusto Ekintzaile Astea – Deusto Emprende Week held from 14 to 18 November 2023 on the Bilbao and Donostia-San Sebastián campuses, entrepreneurship was felt at the UD and in its community.

It was a fantastic week, the eleventh to be held, with many activities that had an impact on the university community. Not in vain, the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Unit of the UD has been awarded as an ambassador of Entrepreneurship Week in Spain.

The award ceremony was attended, among others, by Garbiñe Henry and Víctor Urcelay, Director of the Deusto Innovation and Entrepreneurship Unit and Vice-Rector for Entrepreneurship and Business Relations at the UD. Both highlighted the importance of entrepreneurship and all the activities, which are not a few, that are being carried out year after year at the UD promoting the entrepreneurial culture, the development of the entrepreneurial person, and excellent entrepreneurship.

I am particularly impressed by the words of the award winners, UD students who, in addition to thanking the award, insisted on how important it was for them to participate in the many activities held and to learn through them.

It is clear that we are on the right track and we are looking forward to the next edition. In the meantime, we will continue to participate and promote entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship.

Enjoy the last days of January.

A gala with entrepreneurial and transformative overtones

Arantza Arruti Leave a comment

El pasado 20 de octubre, se celebró en el paraninfo de la Universidad de Deusto la Gala de On 20 October, the Deusto-Santander Entrepreneurship Gala was held in the auditorium of the University of Deusto, hosted by Garbiñe Henry, director of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Unit (IEU) of the University of Deusto. One of its objectives was to recognize the more than 1,400 participants of the various training courses offered by the IEU of the University of Deusto, and promoted by Deusto Emprende and Banco Santander through Santander Universities. These include creaction!, DeustoSTART I, DeustoSTART II, Practicum Emprende, and the Deusto Emprende Week which, by the way, started on Monday.

In addition to having the privilege of attending the Gala, being able to participate in their programmes is a real honour (I can’t deny it, and I recognise that part of my heart is still in the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Unit).

Today I want to share with all of you some of the recommendations shared by one of the star guests, Hasier Larrea, founder and CEO of Ori, “a robotic furniture startup that reinvents spaces”.

Hasier is considered by many to be one of the success stories of Basque entrepreneurship, so I hope his recommendations help you, as they are helping me.

  1. Fall in love with the problem.
  2. Surround yourself with the best, feel small, that is how we learn.
  3. Learn continuously because the world is constantly changing.
  4. Talk to people, understand their problems, and compete against luck.
  5. Persevere, be stubborn, plan, be flexible in tactics.
  6. Lead, listen to the other person (even if you are the last to speak), cooperate with your own team, apply the formula “Know How, Do How, and Know How“.
  7. If you have to “fail”, then fail and move on, but “Never underestimate the heart of an entrepreneur” and believe in yourself.
  8. People will remember very well how you finished, but not how you started, that’s why you have to know how to manage your exits very well.
  9. “Working on something we like is passion, working on something we don’t care about is stress”. Find your own Ikigai and strike a balance between work, family, health, friends, and soul.
  10. Life is about collecting moments that make us smile.

As Hasier said:

Entrepreneurship is about transforming education, medicine, architecture, in short, transforming the world.

Thank you for following there.

Perseverance or balance

Arantza Arruti Leave a comment

This morning (on any given day of the week) a video about lbalance.king.w “popped up” on my instagram account. It’s not the first time, I admit, but this time it made me think about one of the characteristics of P.E. It’s about perseverance.

Some of you may be wondering what this account has to do with perseverance. It is very simple. What made me think about perseverance was the number of times the “man in the video” (sometimes accompanied) has to repeat his “attempt” to achieve his goal (balancing between objects of different materials, sizes and weights).

It is true that it makes you wonder whether the videos are real or not. If they are not, I am left with the need to underline this quality of P.E. Because the truth is that perseverance has been with us since childhood. Think, for example, of how many times a child falls down and gets up again when learning to walk.

When babies are learning to walk, they fall on average 17 times an hour. Given that frequency of falls, you might think their little brains carefully computed all that negative input so they could learn from their errors. Apparently, that’s just not so. Babies don’t change their behavior based on negative feedback, according to researchers at NYU’s Infant Action Lab… Their drive to get from Point A to Point B makes a little thing like falling inconsequential in the scheme of things. And when they do fall, it’s a low-stakes venture with extremely rare negative consequences. So off they go, toddle, tumble, toddle.(Compton, 2021).

And you, do you persevere? Have you ever stopped to think about what it is that makes our perseverance diminish as we get older? Is it a question of culture? or of education?

I invite you, just out of curiosity, to visit the lbalance.king.w account and see if that makes us a little more aware that not everything in life is a gift and that perseverance together with effort are great qualities that, hopefully, will continue to accompany me day after day.

Thank you for still being there.