Telefónica and Ferran Adrià renew their alliance to continue fusing gastronomy with technology in favor of innovation

Innovation Space is one of the new initiatives that Telefónica and chef Ferran Adrià will be able to launch in this new stage of collaboration that they have just begun.. A traveling project where audiovisual systems play a leading role.

Telefónica and Ferran Adrià announced yesterday at a press conference the renewal of their alliance to continue developing initiatives linked to digital innovation. This agreement began its journey in October 2010 and since then the best chef in the world has become the ambassador of the telecommunications operator. “Cooking is the most universal language and César Alierta understood it that way. “He took a risk and here we are now with new projects and a very positive assessment of what we have done so far”, comments the Catalan chef.

In these three years he has accompanied Telefónica in projects of various kinds (university, business, deportiva, technological) and has visited many cities in those countries where Telefónica is present, such as Miami, New York, Lima, Beijing, Mexico, Santiago de Chile, London, as well as the main Spanish capitals. In total he has traveled 29 cities of 17 countries and 50.000 clients have been able to attend the events live.

As Carlos Gómez Blanco explains, Global Director of Sponsorship at Telefónica, “This has been a preparation for what we are going to do together in the future.”. “We want to understand and share with everyone what innovation is in practice and Ferran Adrià has helped us achieve this.”.

In this new stage, of 2014 onwards, technology and digital activation of collaboration will be a preferential objective, y, with this objective, Telefónica and Adrià have developed a program that will promote actions linked to elBulliFoundation that integrates three different but interrelated projects.: elBulli 1846, elBulliDNA, Bullipedia (BullipediaLab), in addition to promoting international exhibitions, talks and conferences.

Located in an old textile factory in the Montjuïc neighborhood, in a space of 1.800 square meters, BullipediaLab is located, Ferran Adrià's ideas laboratory where he works on innovation and education in elBulliFoundation projects, using cooking as language. In addition, They plan to create an international scholarship project supporting young talents from different disciplines.

Bullipedia is a project that began in 2012 and was born to become a tool that serves to obtain information in an orderly and fast manner “and that, first of all, help in the creation process. “This is a creative gastronomic archive that we want to be the most complete and structured in history.”. The 'intellectual' software will be developed in the BullipediaLab where the Decoding of the gastronomic process will be agreed upon., as well as the classifications with which Bullipedia will be built.

The elBulli1846 will take place in the old elBulli and the objective is to take a tour through history to understand avant-garde cuisine but with a new rethinking of the concept of cultural exhibition and, for it, They will use new technologies according to sustainability criteria.

elBulliDNA is a creative center located at the headquarters of elBulli1846 that aims to be “a viewpoint of creativity. Really, It is an evolution of elBulli Taller, “an initiative that changed the way we understand creative cuisine”, Adrià comments. The fruit of the work carried out in this environment will be published on the Internet.

Innovation space

Another initiative that has emerged from this new agreement between Telefónica and Adrià is the Innovation Space, a traveling exhibition project that will be used as a disseminator of content on innovation and creativity that will be located at the operator's headquarters in Madrid before starting its tour of different Spanish cities, Europe and Latin America.

It will be a reflection on innovation and the creative process, articulated on the talent of Ferran Adrià, and the entire paradigm shift that elBulli's cuisine represented worldwide, reflected through technology. In this space, a selection of existing pieces and content will be shown and translated into an experiential language., technological and interactive, to bring Telefónica projects closer, elBulliFoundation and Ferran Adrià to the general public.

This Innovation Space will be accompanied by a complete technological solution that will include interactive panels that incorporate Kinect technology so that the viewer can decide on the dishes they want to see.; an interactive table that will be supported by different projectors and pictograms that were used at elBulli; and an interactive machine that will allow you to discover what dishes were served in the famous Adrià restaurant. The latter is designed as a NASA control panel, with switches, LED and screens.

Finally, and to highlight the creative process that was carried out at elBulli, this space will offer, through projections that will be reflected on tableware, how each of the dishes is made, from sketch to final project, going through the plasticine model and its manufacturing.

The Innovation Space will have an online replica at vive.telefonica.com, so that the action reaches the greatest number of people in the world. This space will include a gamification part both on the web and for mobile devices, and the actions will be energized on social networks.

Exhibitions and volunteering

For your part, Telefónica Foundation will present "Ferran Adrià. Auditing the creative process, an exhibition project dedicated to the creative universe of the brilliant chef who was in charge of elBulli during 25 years. With almost 1.000 square meters, The exhibition will be the largest so far dedicated to the brilliant author and can be seen at the Espacio Fundación Telefónica in Madrid from the beginning of October to the beginning of March.

Another novelty of this ninth stage of collaboration is the activation of a social program that links Adrià with Telefónica's corporate volunteering., the global network made up of more than 24.000 volunteers from the different countries in which the company is present.