| Barcelona: my favorite Innovation Ecosystem
by Gregor Gimmy
Conventional wisdom claims that innovation happens in laboratories located in somewhat isolated locations. Cultural melting pots like New York or Barcelona are not usually regarded as the place where a company would set up a multimillion dollar R&D facility for its top engineers. This was my conviction in the nineties. It was so strong it made me hop across continents from Europe to Silicon Valley. To my surprise, working there I discovered that a major change is in the air: the rules for locating innovation are changing drastically. Here is how.
 download the PDF
Let's look back in time. Traditionally, researchers had to focus on fundamental sciences like chemistry and physics to evolve from a world of low-tech to high-tech. Breakthrough ideas came from scientific materials analysis and experiments, spectrophotometers and electronic microscopes, not from scouting out advanced music festivals, watching youngsters skateboard the stairs of the modern art museum, or from just sitting in a street café being attentive to diverse crowds of people. These were considered distractions, reducing scientific productivity.
Accordingly, laboratory architecture was dull and focused inside-in, windows to the world were minimized in size and number, and there was little access to a diversity of cultures and lifestyles. How many people have heard of (or thought of moving to) Murray Hill, Mountain View or Meyrin? Well, these locations are birthplaces for world-transforming innovations like the transistor, the silicon micro-chip and the world-wide-web. Since the inception of R&D labs around 1920, the horsepower of these innovation engines has been steadily increased with all kinds of technology to become ever better at churning out what is considered the ultimate measure for innovation capacity: patents. In 1960, about 50.000 new patents were granted by the United States Patent Office, in 1995 100.000 and in 2004 over 160.000.
However, if our R&D labs have experienced such astonishing improvement over the last decades, why has the failure rate of new products more than doubled from around 40% in 1970 to currently over 80%? The common answer is: with so many new products, consumers are saturated and growingly tired to adopt new products. Really? How often did we change our one and only communication device in 1970 and how fast do we change our various new ones these days? In 1970, how many products did we have to listen to music, and how many devices do we embrace today? Consumers today are hungrier than ever before for cool new products. Do we really have too many products, or do we have too few good ones?
What has changed? Well, in the past products were good if they just worked. Today, con-sumers are much more demanding. In the past, we were challenged to create technology that satisfied basic needs. Today, we are challenged to unearth complex needs and find readily available technology to swiftly respond to them. Today, technology capabilities alone are no longer sufficient for successful innovation. Capabilities to anticipate user needs and to translate these into product solutions are critical success factors. People R&D may very well be more difficult than technology R&D. Consider this: which is more challenging? To know how to build a video camera into a phone or to understand if users want it and how they may use it? Yesterday innovation was technology driven, today it must be people driven.
How does this impact our centers for innovation? How do we change our laboratories so they maintain their innovation power? Here are two think-abouts: one, transfer innovation from isolation into the midst of tech-savvy, cultural hotpots –so called innovation ecosystems. Two, train your innovators to roam out-side the lab-walls to harness their new environment for inspiration. Build their ability and passion to research people's latent and future needs, and to translate these into better product-solutions. Avoid building laboratories in far away places. And encourage your engineers to go beyond just reading secondary market research. Innovators will be much more effective if they themselves interact with customers, and then leverage this experience.
So, what are these innovation ecosystems
and where are they? They are large and dense metropolis –like New York and Barcelona– which highly concentrate the interdependent forces of innovation into a ten-mile radius. They house top academic institutions in science, engineering, business and design that generate innovators with deep domain expertise. They provide a wealthy infrastructure of resources, companies, logistics and so forth that catalyze the conception of creative networks. At the same time, they are socio-cultural epicenters, melting pots of behaviors, races and sub-cultures, happenings, fashion and art that fertilize the dynamic evolution of needs. Innovation ecosystems are cities that literally become an extension of the R&D lab, probably its most precious one.
It is in these innovation ecosystems where
R&D professionals who are inspired by advanced music festivals and by people strolling by a street-café, and who have the expertise to make sense of lifestyles and experiences, will turn into the next generation
of cutting edge innovators of products that connect with people.
Doubtful? Try this: ask your top ten engineers if they would move to Barcelona, my new favorite innovation ecosystem. 
download the PDF
For further information about this topic please contact Gregor Gimmy |
