The Chamber of Commerce of Lanzarote served more than 2,100 entrepreneurs through the Business Creation Service in 2013, which is 14 percent more than in the previous year. This figure reveals "a growing interest in self-employment."
This was stated by the general director of the Canarian Employment Service of the Government of the Canary Islands, Alejandro Martín López, who visited the Chamber this Friday and assured that this guidance and advice service has become "a very efficient and very useful reference for entrepreneurship and job creation in the Canary Islands."
This service is the only free advice and guidance service offered on the island in a complementary or circular way, since the Chamber has a placement agency, an initial guidance and advice service on procedures, legal forms, viability plans, guidance for financing and the first steps to take in creating a company.
But in addition, it offers the "ideal" place to start, the Lanzarote Business Incubator, in the same facilities of the Business Innovation Center where the Chamber is located. "This closes a perfect circle around entrepreneurship, which goes from the idea or seed to the germination and incubation of the business project," explained the president of the Chamber, José Torres Fuentes.
Economic diversification
For the president of the Chamber, self-employment is "fundamental in these times but taking into account a very important factor, the diversification of the activities to be developed." José Torres Fuentes has referred to all the matters in which Lanzarote has its own and deep knowledge, such as wine tourism, nautical-sports activities or sustainable tourism.
"In these matters we are a reference and we stand out," he stressed. In addition, there are others that "are emerging strongly and with many expectations", which are those linked to the agro-industry of local products or technology.
The proposal in which the Chamber of Commerce is working to achieve this diversification involves three aspects: the qualification of the unemployed, the entrepreneurship of new companies linked to these matters and the internationalization and regionalization of this knowledge and products.
