Do you perceive that companies are starting to consider transfer as another innovation tool?
I have spent a large part of my professional life analyzing how companies evolve and how innovation can be a lever for their growth. From my early stages, I saw that only large companies had an innovation strategy; at this moment, fortunately, there are many companies, and not just large ones, that have these innovation policies integrated.
Another, more important advance—and this one does have to do with transfer—is that increasingly, companies are aware that to reach true levels of innovation, the necessary knowledge that provides them with new capabilities is found outside of their structures.
We have evolved to an open innovation model where the search for alliances with the different members of the value chain or with other members of the ecosystem, including those who provide knowledge and science, are identified as an opportunity to generate competitive advantage.
Therefore, I do see an evolution, because all companies that start with an innovation strategy eventually come to have a strategy related to transfer, these companies and those that are born directly from knowledge like ‘spin-offs’ or some startups. What concerns me is that we still have a structural challenge in making innovation accessible to all sizes of organization, and that is that Spain is a country of ‘SMEs’ and ‘micro-SMEs,’ and many of them do not have the sufficient structure to house resources that allow innovation to be activated, and mind you, that doesn’t mean they lack awareness of innovation; what they lack is structure.
From your answer, it is deduced that the ecosystem is an essential element for the activation of open innovation. Do you miss any actor that could or should be part of it?
More than missing someone, what I see is new people. For example, much of the innovation happens because it is the smallest companies that contribute a component/knowledge to a larger supplier. There are also cases where instead of these small companies being the ones contributing knowledge, it is other actors from the public administration itself who generate the knowledge and transfer and transmit it to the companies they collaborate with.
But we have also seen new agents appear that are part of the ecosystem, for example in the financial system (the banking system and entities representing investors) who are beginning to value and invest in knowledge as an intangible asset.
The supply of knowledge in Spain is attractive to these investors, because our researchers are very good at generating this type of knowledge through their projects, to the point that these financial agents are on the lookout for projects financed by the administration in order to co-finance them, offering them participating loans, tax restructurings, and other alternatives.
Another new profile that is emerging is that of end-users, such as patient family associations, who are prescribers of those projects that allow for solving or generating treatments and cures for these loved ones, even pushing and financing part of these types of projects so that they are carried out. They are users with the capacity to boost the ecosystem due to the demand they place on the system.
The ideal scenario would be to gather all these demands and provide a solution for them, but for that, the collaboration of all types of profiles, both public and private, is necessary. So, what do you think we can do to boost private-public collaborations that manage to improve people’s lives?
I get asked this question a lot; the important thing here is to identify the different barriers that exist between the public sector (in our case) and companies, because when you are able to overcome them, these collaborations always end up working.
Since I am more familiar with the public side, I would tell you that we tend to speak a language that the private side does not understand. We talk about the knowledge we have and generate, but companies are more concerned with their own survival and always being competitive.
One of the most critical barriers is timing, the synchronization between what a company needs and when it needs it, and what an organization or institution can do and how long it takes to do it.
Therefore, it is necessary for there to be a willingness to understand between both parties from the beginning, or at least a rapprochement, in which organizations, especially public ones, make a change in mindset to understand that our research must be redirected and impact society. Regarding companies, we must ensure they avoid falling into the bias that what we do is almost free and that we can solve all their problems.
Personally, I have a lot of faith in long-term private-public relationships, fostering the mindset of staying in contact and knowing the day-to-day so that when a problem arises, there is a greater capacity for reaction.
Collaborative relationships whose main objective is to jointly pursue some kind of specific project are not very useful in the long term because once one of the parties has achieved its objective, it disengages from the other.
That is why I say that in the end, long-term relationships are always the most necessary and also the most profitable, since they do not have a very high cost for companies nor do they impose a burden on institutions.
