Page 17 - AC/E's Digital Culture Annual Report 2015

AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 201517models yet to be designed. National institutes of statistics will improve their econometric models and socioeconomic data even further and will make them available to newly created companies that will generate modern distribution models and will boost the productivity of companies and whole geographical areas.Spain needs to take a leap into the twenty-first century and, above all, its SMEs need to realise that they must be better managed, have a broad variety of employees, improve women’s careers and, in general, think globally in order to be able to remain competitive and capable in an environment where, far from knowing our usual rivals, we are witnessing the emergence of others on the other side of the world about which we do not have any information but which sudden- ly access our own customer through the Internet and by the time we realise it is too late.This growing need goes hand-in-hand withnew professionals who in most cases do not yet exist and whom we will have to train as fast as possible so that they can contribute with their knowledge to this type of structural and business model changes that are drawing near.Spain dislikes risks and this makes us slower than average to invest in innovation – the key to our future and more so now – with the concepts of so-called “open innovation” which, according to Wikipedia:Open Innovation, a term coined by Professor Henry Chesbrough, is a new innovation strategy whereby companies go beyond the internal boundaries of their organisation and in which cooperation with external professionals playsa fundamental role Open Innovation means combining internal knowledge with external knowledge in order to carry forward strategy and R&D1 projects It also means that compa- nies use both internal channels and external channels to place their products and innovative technologies on the market In this context, universities and research centres offer new perspectives and solutions to the companies that use this model This type of innovation relates to the possible occurrence of what is known as collective intelligence2Companies have traditionally handled innova- tion3 in a closed manner (closed innovation), employing a system whereby researchprojects are managed exclusively with the organisation’s own knowledge and resources According to this classic model, projects can only begin inside the company and end on its own market However, under the Open Innova- tion model, projects can originate both within and outside the company, can be incorporated both at the beginning and at intermediate stages of the innovation process, and can reach the market through that company or through other enterprises (patents4 licence, technology transfer5, etc)[translated from the Spanish Wikipedia entry]One of the most important parts of this concept is acceptance of the fact that we must innovate with customers and get them to collaborate with us, from outside, as if they were part of our own development team. However good we are at innovating within our company, there will always be more researchers outside than inside and this should allow us to increase our innovation exponentially.Rodolfo Carpintier