11/10/2022 Álvaro Simón de Blas | General

Innovation trends in Spain

Álvaro Simón de Blas

Director of BIC Euronova European Business and Innovation Centre in Malaga and President of ANCES

I recently read an article in Executive Excellence magazine entitled "Finding and growing islands of innovation within a large company". Truly a very suggestive title for those of us who in one way or another are dedicated to discovering and valuing innovation in business models and turning them into well-managed companies, generating value in a sustainable and efficient way. This is essentially what the network of incubators grouped around the ANCES association has been doing in Spain for the last 30 years and BIC Euronova in Malaga.

The article itself was focused on Large Companies, which, as is well known in Spain, represent a tiny number of companies compared to the universe of existing SMEs, which make up the bulk of business activity. In it, the difficulties for innovation to expand and have positive effects in large organisations were exposed. Among the most notorious difficulties, the following were identified;  many large companies have divisions and functions of innovation, incubation and technological exploration that operate independently, without a common language or tools, which makes it difficult to implement these innovations; the innovative individuals within the organisation are not at the top of the executive pyramid of the company, so they have to be sought at much lower levels and often, Finally, corporate incubators get good press and do a good job of building corporate culture, but in most cases their most important products are demos that are never deployed in the field.

Increasingly, therefore, growing innovation in a large company depends more and more on an external startup. For some years now, open innovation programmes have been working, either launched from within large companies, or supported by initiatives such as the one we at ANCES have been managing, called ANCES Open Innovation, which is now in its sixth edition. The agility and freshness with which these micro-companies operate allows them to offer solutions to challenges that, within large companies, their overly hierarchical innovation departments cannot respond to, either in terms of time or knowledge.

The conclusion of the article in question was that the job of a good innovation manager or CTO to make the islands of innovation grow in a large company consists of:

- Create a common process, language and tools for innovation.

- Make them permanent with a written innovation doctrine and policy.

These conclusions can be fully shared with a multitude of Spanish SMEs, which in some sectors are European leaders. Within this categorisation of companies, there are many medium-sized family companies that are progressively discovering their innovation islands or are doing so with external help, with the help of the European Business and Innovation Centres CEEIs/BICs that exist in all the Autonomous Communities, which not only manage business incubators where start-ups and recently created companies take their first steps, but also help and provide their services to consolidated companies that have to innovate to survive in increasingly competitive markets and where the differentiation to achieve a more attractive value proposition lies in innovation and continuous improvement.