Spain’s GEM Association (Asociación GEM España), belonging to the international observatory Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), carries out a yearly analysis and comparison of entrepreneurship indicators in Spain. To do so it is broken down into nineteen regional teams, with over one hundred researchers and the support of nearly a hundred institutions, companies and organizations.

The auditorium of Pino’s Fundación Rafael hosted the presentation of the eighteenth GEM Spain Report, announcing the good news of Spain’s upturning entrepreneurship rate, breaking the 6% threshold for the first time in eight years. Despite this increase, however, Spain is still lagging behind the European mean.

GMV is one of the companies highlighted in the Report as a knowledge-based enterprise. This wholly Spanish company is an upbeat success story. Starting out as a university group carrying out ESA space R&D projects, driven by the entrepreneurship of an ETSI Aeronautucs professor and a group of students, GMV has now grown into a worldwide industrial group running subsidiaries in nine countries, employing over 1600 highly-skilled professionals and chalking up a 2017 revenue of over 160 million euros, 65% of which stems from international projects on all five continents. This growth strategy is based on continuous innovation, 10% of its turnover being plowed back into R&D.

The main recommendations of this Report, drawn up from consultations of 600 experts, revolve around the need for new government policies to cut down the tax burden and red tape for startups, favoring entrepreneurship training and driving the development of public and private financial instruments geared towards the creation of new business.