KABIA is a new initiative driven by the Basque Government, it has been presented through HAZI to support entrepreneurs who develop their activity or wish to start new business projects in areas of rural and coastal Euskadi, as well as those related to the value chain of food and wood.

This new space offers a physical and digital meeting point to facilitate contact between people who share interests, challenges and experiences, agents of the sector and entities of the ecosystem to support entrepreneurship projects.

80% of the people who have requested HAZI support to undertake a new business project do so individually. The start-up of a new business is, therefore, an almost always solitary path in which many uncertainties and doubts have to be addressed, because there is not a clear understanding of where to start or sufficient training is not available.

This is one of the reasons why the Entrepreneurship Thursday program started in 2015, face-to-face meetings that encourage contact between entrepreneurs to share experiences, detect opportunities or mature their projects with innovative ideas. It was precisely in this forum that the need to advance in the promotion of entrepreneurial culture and in the connection between people with initiatives emerged.

The solution to this need is KABIA, an initiative that incorporates in all of the above a virtual space that collects all the material generated in the face-to-face meetings and will serve as a forum for the entire entrepreneurial community to be continuously organized and connected and to have access to training courses, examples of inspiring experiences, network of contacts, expert advice…

To explain the nature of KABIA, a representation of the people who are part of it has developed during the presentation a gastronomic dish as a staging of the benefits of community entrepreneurship, in which the ingredients for the optimal result are the well-connected entrepreneurs.

In addition to various actors and representatives of entities supporting entrepreneurship, the event was attended by Jone Fernández Landa, Director of Rural and Coastal Development and European Policies of the Basque Government, who highly appreciated the implementation of KABIA: “Such initiatives respond to the need to generate reference spaces for cooperation, conversation, exchange of ideas, learning and innovation.”

The director added that “the main problems faced by an entrepreneur have to do with the lack of structure to address certain issues. That’s why meeting points like KABIA are important, created from the personal will to interact with the rest and the purpose of actively contributing to improve and strengthen the entrepreneurial ecosystem.”