Digital Enterprise Show 2022, the reference technological event in Southern Europe on digital transformation, has closed its sixth edition with a total of 14,843 attendees. Malaga has become from June 14 to 16 the global meeting point for professionals from around the world looking for the most innovative solutions to digitise their respective companies or administrations, create new business models, and improve the user experience.

Sandra Infante, director of Digital Enterprise Show 2022, says: "The city has welcomed us with open arms and DES 2022 has been a great success. This is an example of public-private collaboration to promote spaces where large international corporations meet with entrepreneurial talent and consolidated national and local companies, as well as organisations and training centers. All this to reaffirm Malaga as a pole of attraction for technological and research investments". Infante adds: "this is only the first edition in Andalusia of many to come. We will continue working together with the City Council, the Provincial Council of Malaga, and Junta de Andalucía so that Digital Enterprise Show grows in the coming years and does it here".

A luxurious finishing touch to a successful edition

During the last day of DES 2022 Reyes Maroto, Minister of Industry, Trade, and Tourism of the Government of Spain inaugurated the Tourism & Hospitality Forum, dedicated to the digitisation and transformation of the tourism industry, which currently represents 12.7% of total employment at the national level. During her speech, she said that "2022 will be the year of the recovery of tourism, but we have to move towards the quality, sustainable, digital, and inclusive sector. Spain, as a leader, has the opportunity to be a benchmark in digitisation and tourism innovation, and the Government is working together with the destinations to help them in their digitisation".

Likewise, Maroto has highlighted the importance of the data economy in the travel industry companies to create "tourist experiences that connect the user, the destination and the company". As an example of a case of digital transformation within the administration, the minister has pointed to a smart tourism platform created by the government to integrate on a single basis the services that public and private entities offer to tourists at the destination.

The DES 2022 figures

From June 14 to 16, DES2022 has brought to Malaga more than 336 exhibiting companies, 600 international experts, who have analyzed the digital challenges in the sectors of Banking, Commerce, Marketing, Industry, Mobility, Health or Tourism, and more than 250 media that have spread worldwide how digitisation can become the best option to gain competitiveness, efficiency and cost savings.

However, what brought the most media attention was the presence of one of DES's Keynote Speakers 2022: the former President of the United States, Barack Obama. His session brought together 1,000 executives from major international companies who listened for an hour to Obama's first-hand advice on current geopolitical, economic and social challenges. The former president emphasised the need to digitise business ecosystems to give value to human talent, as well as to rely on technology to reduce "tedious jobs".

Along with former President Obama, the sixth edition of DES has welcomed experts from different sectors such as Gunter Pauli, creator of the term "Blue Economy" who has shown how AI, Blockchain, or IoT can help develop solutions that, for example, clean the seas and oceans of plastics at the level of nanoparticles. Also, Javier Pardo de Santayana Gómez de Olea, Head of Multilateral Cooperation on Armament of Ministry of Defense - Armament Directorate of Spain Government; José María Vera Villacián, CEO of UNICEF Spain; Lisa Mae Brunson, innovation guru and founder of Wonder Woman Tech; Raghu Ravinutala, an entrepreneur who has led his startup to become a unicorn in Silicon Valley; or Choy Yon Kong, vice president of the Singapore Economic Development Board, have participated in the congress. In total more than 320 sessions and debates in which attendees have learned the keys to understanding the disruptive digital and economic concepts that have emerged in recent times.

For the first time, DES 2022 hosted a forum to boost the entrepreneurial ecosystem: The Scale-Up! World Summit. For 3 days, this space, which has had an exclusive pavilion, has given more than 2,000 international startups the opportunity to present their business models to thousands of companies and corporations gathered these days at DES. The finalist startups have climbed into a "ring", a stage where they have confronted potential investors with their business models, while they have been selected by hundreds of investment funds and corporate ventures that have come to the event in search of new projects at a more advanced stage in which to invest. Those finally selected, a total of 19, will enter a new dimension that will offer them the opportunity to "scale" more quickly to new international markets.