The challenge isn't so much creating a company as making it last. The data reflects this. Around 100,000 companies are established in Catalonia each year (this figure includes everything from corporations to sole proprietorships and others), but only three are over 300 years old (Codorniu, which is no longer owned by the Raventós family; Raventós itself, which has other businesses in the sector; and the Publications of Montserrat Abbey). This data was presented by Oriol Amat, professor at Pompeu Fabra University-Barcelona School of Management (UPF-BSM) and director of the Family Business Observatory. Together with a colleague, Jordi Tarragona, Amat analyzed family-controlled companies and concluded that only 17% have a high level of professionalization. The experts based their findings on responses from 129 companies out of a sample of 1,200. And this refers to professionalization, understood as the opposite of improvisation, lack of systematization, or acting solely on intuition, which is key to business survival, according to these researchers. The fact that survival is a challenge is demonstrated by the fact that only 30% of companies reach the second generation and only 13% the third.

With an insatiable curiosity, Ricard Solé (Barcelona, ​​1962) devoured every secondhand book that arrived at the family library. Those readings further spurred his imagination, and questions piled up in his mind. Perhaps that's why the questions he now tries to answer move between disciplines, between science and the humanities, between physics and neuroscience, chemistry and philosophy, and science fiction.

"It's changed our lives," Imma Santiago Die affirms with conviction and a genuine smile. "Not just mine, but everyone who's participated. We're not the same as before," she insists, giving her sister Carme a knowing look, who nods in agreement. "Now we take care of our diet, we exercise, do cognitive stimulation, and go for walks and do activities together. In fact, we're meeting up for lunch today," she explains.

The expansion of platform work over the last decade has transformed labor relations in many ways, including the health risks associated with this type of work. This is the impact studied by the European project GIG-OSH, a collaboration between Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) and the Hospital del Mar Research Institute Barcelona, ​​using data from seven countries across the continent. Both institutions published the report on Tuesday. Working on digital platforms: what do we know about health and safety?The study highlights how the apparent flexibility promised by apps can become a form of precarious employment with dynamics detrimental to the physical and mental well-being of workers.

A reaffirmation of the public sector's role. That's what the president of the European Investment Bank (EIB), Nadia Calviño, did today upon receiving the award. Public figure of the year '24 From Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) - Barcelona School of Management (BSM). After receiving the award from the mayor of Barcelona, ​​Jaume Collboni, the former vice president of the Spanish government for more than five years also highlighted the importance of European unity in the current geopolitical context. "While some build walls, in Europe we build bridges," she declared.

The question haunts us all from a young age: "What do you want to be when you grow up?" The first few times it is asked, the answers usually come in the form of police officer, firefighter, veterinarian, soccer player, or the recently added profession. influencer. While children are young, adults' reaction to these ideas is usually a mixture of tenderness and grace, but as time goes by, all this leads to the big question: "Will you ever find a job if you study this?" And here the humanities often come out on top.

"I like it when you're hot". This phrase from Bad Bunny's song Sorry BB:/, In Catalan we could translate it literally and, nevertheless, we would understand that this hot It doesn't refer to temperature, but rather to sexual attraction. The translation would go unnoticed, and compared to the uploaded content of any other reggaeton song, it might seem like a rather mild phrase.

More than 25% of girls – one in four – of Generation Z [born between 1997 and 2012] identify as non-heterosexual. This percentage is double the way their older sisters, the millennials, identify, and also distances themselves from their male peers, who show a more normative sexual orientation. This data is extracted from research by Maria Rodó-Zárate, a researcher at the Pompeu Fabra University of Barcelona (UPF), and Joel Cantó Roche, a doctoral student at the Canadian University of Toronto. Based on two official surveys of 4,000 young Catalan women of both generations, they analyzed how between 2017 and 2018, "more and more young people are opting for less rigid identifications, and moving away from fixed labels such as... gay either lesbian", the authors of the study point out, while adopting "more open positions, such as bisexuality or other forms of sexual diversity".

A four-month-old baby, sitting on its mother's lap, looks at a screen displaying dinosaurs of different colors and sizes, and, from time to time, phrases in Chinese can be heard. Across the room, a team of researchers scrutinizes the baby's reactions and records reaction times to stimuli. This is one of the experiments conducted at the Childhood Research Laboratory at the Center for Brain Cognition (CBC) at Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), where they attempt to decipher questions such as how we perceive language before speaking or how we face the challenge of learning two languages ​​instead of one.

Laia de Nadal (Barcelona, ​​​​1972) has been president of the Catalan Association of Public Universities (ACUP) since the beginning of the year. She has been rector of Pompeu Fabra University for almost two years. As a professor of medicine and life sciences, she co-directed the Cell Signaling Research Group, affiliated with the Barcelona Biomedical Research Institute.

The lyrics of songs, both in English and Spanish, are increasingly sexist, especially in the use of words related to the possession and control of the female body by men. This is one of the conclusions of a research led by Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), which has analyzed the lyrics of more than 2,000 songs from the period between 1960 and 2022. According to the study, which has been carried out with artificial intelligence tools, 51% of the songs have songs. Since 2015, the increase is exponential. In fact, if the songs of the last decade are analyzed, 77% of the most listened to songs have sexist lyrics.

For the first time since the ranking QS Quacquarelli Symonds exists, three Catalan universities are among the top 250 positions. The list, which is one of the three most important in the world (along with the Times Higher Education and the University of Shanghai), was published on Tuesday and ranks 1,300 universities according to the academic works published and cited and the opinions of 130,000 academics and 75,000 professionals who work in them. The three Catalan universities are among the 20% of the best in the world.

At the Universitat Pompeu Fabra they are preparing what they consider to be an "educational revolution". In two years' time, students will have half or fewer lectures and more group sessions in which the teacher will be a coach or tutor, fewer multiple-choice exams and more reflection and participation in class. Inspired by the wave of educational transformation that for a decade has changed schools and institutes in the country and also by how the best universities in the world, such as MIT and Stanford, work, the UPF wants to move towards a university model which "faces the future".

Spanish justice continues its restrictive drift of rights, applying a double standard depending on who is convicted. This Thursday the Provincial Court of Madrid has again postponed the imprisonment of 10 of the 14 neo-fascists who on Catalonia day in 2013 assaulted Blanquerna Cultural Centre in Madrid while it was celebrating an institutional event. Everyone remembers the images of the assailants entering with a violent and threatening attitude, launching proclamations in favour of the unity of Spain and pushing those who faced up to them, such as the then CiU MP Josep Sánchez-Llibre. They did so in broad daylight and without much concern for concealing their identity. And yet, after being sentenced to over two years in prison (between 2 years and 7 months and 2 years and 9 months) --a sentence already ratified by the Supreme Court and the Constitutional court-- none of them has spent a single day in jail. The attack, therefore, goes unpunished.