Three editions to turn innovation from a hunch into a method
Leading and coordinating a public innovation programme for small companies in Aragón: 36 businesses, more than 400 hours of one-to-one mentoring, and a rating that rose with every edition.
The challenge
The Instituto Aragonés de Fomento wanted small and emerging companies in Aragón to adopt technology and innovative business models in practice, not in theory. Each edition brought together around a dozen companies at very different stages: from projects still at the idea stage to established industrial firms.
The difficulty was not the content but the execution. A programme like this rests on a panel of specialist external mentors, in-person sessions, dozens of one-to-one mentoring slots and companies with full diaries. It falls over on logistics long before it runs out of good ideas.
And there was a second, less obvious challenge: each edition had to come out better than the last without breaking what already worked.
Approach
We led and coordinated the programme end to end, edition after edition: recruiting and selecting mentors, designing the calendar, running the logistics of each session, following up with every company, documenting the work and evaluating the results.
The format combines one in-person group session per topic area with four hours of one-to-one mentoring per company and area, so each business works on its own project rather than on a generic case.
- Three areas per edition: organising innovation, generating disruptive ideas, and funding
- Recruitment and coordination of a panel of specialist mentors, with backups planned for the unexpected
- Four hours of one-to-one mentoring per company and area, split into two sessions from 2025
- A shared record for every mentoring session: lessons, obstacles and action plan
- A closing Demo Day, introduced in 2025 and consolidated in 2026
- Artificial intelligence as the thread running through the organisation and ideation areas in 2026
- A satisfaction survey and a final report each edition, with improvements applied to the next one
Key outcomes
3
consecutive editions led and coordinated between 2024 and 2026: the contract was renewed twice.
36
companies from Aragón supported, across very different sectors and stages, from early idea to established industry.
400+
hours of one-to-one mentoring coordinated, with a panel of ten specialist mentors across the three areas.
4.20 → 4.90
rating for the organisation and management of the programme, out of 5, from the participant survey.
The response rate to that survey went from 77% to 100%, so the final rating is everyone's, not just the happiest. And the clearest sign that the improvement loop worked is the worst score of the first edition: the calendar, rated 3.60 out of 5 in 2024 for squeezing everything into three weeks. It was stretched to seven weeks in 2025 and nine in 2026, and that same question rose to 4.11 and then 4.30. The Demo Day, introduced in 2025 with a modest score, improved by 16.8% the following year.
What makes it work
Every edition closed with a survey and a report that said plainly what had gone wrong: mentors recruited at short notice, calendars too tight, companies admitted without a solid enough project. Those conclusions did not stay in the report; they became concrete changes in the next edition. That is why the rating climbs instead of holding steady: not because the programme was good from the start, but because it was corrected three times with the data in front of us.
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