#04 Meet ANCES

Inside BIAD – 14 partners, one shared ambition

Behind BIAD are 14 partner organisations, each bringing its own expertise, networks and experience to the project. Through this series, we introduce the partners shaping BIAD and the people who turn their organisations’ expertise into concrete project work.

The Asociación Nacional de Centros Europeos de Empresas e Innovación (ANCES) is the Spanish national association of European Business and Innovation Centres, bringing together more than 33 innovation support centres across the country. As the national representative of the European BIC Network, ANCES connects regional innovation ecosystems with European policies, programmes and partnerships, while supporting entrepreneurship, SME competitiveness and territorial development.

This network structure is central to ANCES’s contribution to BIAD. The organisation combines a national coordination role with strong territorial reach through its member centres, allowing the project to connect European-level objectives with the needs of businesses, training providers and local ecosystems. Within BIAD, two centres – CEEI Ciudad Real and CEEI Cartagena – act as territorial extensions of ANCES, supporting stakeholder engagement and fieldwork in two very different Spanish contexts.

This territorial dimension is particularly visible in WP2 – Skills Gap Mapping. Through its CEEI network, ANCES organises diagnostic workshops, gathers input from tourism and hospitality professionals and public authorities, conducts expert interviews and contributes to the comparative analysis of digital, green and resilience-related skills needs. Working simultaneously in Castilla-La Mancha and the Region of Murcia also enables BIAD to capture the realities of both inland and coastal tourism ecosystems.

The findings generated through this work then feed directly into the next stages of the project. In WP4, ANCES helps ensure that BIAD’s learning content, competence frameworks and digital training tools respond to actual labour-market needs. In WP5, it coordinates pilot training activities in Spain alongside FADE, particularly targeting startups, entrepreneurs and SMEs in the Málaga and Andalusia tourism ecosystem, while mobilising its wider innovation network to reach trainers and learners.

ANCES also has a key responsibility for ensuring that BIAD’s results continue to generate value beyond the lifetime of the project. Within WP6, it leads Task T6.2 – Exploitation Strategy and Business Growth Development, coordinating the exploitation plan, market analysis, potential business models and pathways for the uptake of BIAD outputs. This also involves exploring links with financial and investment actors and identifying opportunities to support the long-term sustainability of the project’s results.

This work is led operationally by Eva María Elena Ramos, European Project Manager at ANCES and Exploitation Manager for BIAD. With more than 19 years of experience in European project management, R&D funding, business development and innovation support, Eva brings particular expertise in exploitation strategy, business modelling, intellectual property rights and investment readiness. Her professional background has also given her extensive experience working with SMEs, startups and investor networks and supporting the transition from project results to viable market and sustainability strategies.

Within BIAD, Eva coordinates the consortium’s work on market uptake, exploitation and business growth, including the preparation and regular updating of the project’s exploitation plan. At the same time, she coordinates ANCES’s contribution to the Spanish skills-gap analysis and pilot training activities, linking the strategic exploitation dimension of the project with the evidence and feedback gathered directly from businesses and territorial stakeholders.

Her role therefore reflects ANCES’s broader position within BIAD: connecting local realities with national networks and transforming project results into approaches that can be used, replicated and sustained beyond the partnership itself.