Today we spoke with Luis Manero, Director of Innovation in SMEs at Innobasque, the Basque Innovation Agency, which is dedicated to promoting innovation throughout the business and social fabric of the Basque Country.
What is Innobasque?
We are a public-private partnership, with approximately 900 member entities, where you can find companies of all types: large, medium, small, from multiple sectors of activity… We also have the scope of public administrations, from city councils, local agencies, through county councils, up to the Basque government, with connections at European level.
We also have representation of the agents of the Basque science, technology and innovation network. We are talking about universities, vocational training centers, technology centers, research centers, centers of excellence, i.e., the whole set that allows the development of R&D in the country. And finally, we also have a large representation of social entities.
Innovation is a key factor in the competitiveness and sustainability of countries, both at the business and social level. That is to say, we know that innovation allows us to have a better quality of life, to have better jobs, to have greater wealth, to make our companies more competitive… and that is the goal that marks the mission of Innobasque, of the Basque Innovation Agency, which is to make this country one of the leading regions in Europe in terms of innovation.
Innobasque being a very active agent in the dissemination of innovation, how much does it cost us to innovate?
Innovating is something that is paradoxical for me, because it is not so difficult, on the one hand, but it is very complicated at times to execute. I say that it is not so difficult to understand the need to do it. I think we all have a grandfather and we have been told to renew or die. You have to adapt to change, especially in an environment that is changing at lightning speed. We are in a society that has its own social, demographic, economic transformations… There are wars, price increases, interest rates… transformations that are becoming faster and faster, their latency is becoming shorter and shorter and you have to adapt to them.
In the end, if you do not adapt and stay very rigid, rigid things end up breaking when they are exposed to vibrations and very important movements. In this sense, at Innobasque we are here to motivate all those agents that we mentioned before, to be in tune with each other to make these adaptations and fundamental changes for the Basque society.
What do I mean by this? We know, analyze, evaluate and see how the Basque science, technology and innovation network is developing innovation with capital letters, that is to say, here I include from the most fundamental or basic research, technological developments, to applied innovation, the smallest, that is to say, when the company of any kind or society applies these innovations.
Secondly, we take this information, which we sometimes have in the form of reports, analytical documents, and we pass it on to different agents. On the one hand, to the public administrations with which we work, so that they take into account these conclusions obtained from the work of many people, in order to provide the best solutions, make the best decisions and define the best instruments in the form of aid, subsidies, strategies, initiatives…
On the other hand, we have the accompaniment of companies. Knowing all these opportunities that are opening up on the horizon as a result of new technologies or social changes, how to ensure that companies take advantage of them, position themselves well, be competitive in this new environment and that Basque companies continue to do what they have been doing very well in recent years, which is to have a presence in chains of high added value, medium-high added value at international level, which allows us to have a very pleasant standard of living for all of us who live in this country.
And finally, what we are also dedicated to in this sense is to disseminate these results, to continue making the next generations aware that innovation is very important, that we have to be doing things very well, that we have to be very alert to what is coming, what trends are changing and how to adapt quickly to them.
Luis Manero and Felipe Rebollo.
What are the tools you are using in the SME arena?
The first great tool that Innobasque has is its network of allies, that is, in recent years we have been able to build a network of more than 70 agents of all types in the Basque Country. I am talking about territorial and local agents, development agencies, rural development agencies, town councils. Agents who are very close to SMEs, with whom they have a very intimate relationship, because in the end, even if it is only to ask for a building permit, it is necessary to go to the town halls. And there they have tools to help with innovation.
We also have more thematic or sectorial agents: clusters, business associations, chambers of commerce… that also work with us. And finally, we also have institutional entities, that is, we are talking about agents such as SPRI, such as BEAS in the case of Bizkaia, such as other provincial councils or services of the provincial councils. This network of agents is an instrument that allows us to get very close. We have to take into account that in Innobasque we are around 35 or 40 people and it would be impossible to cover the more than 9,000 SMEs in this country, let’s say key for its activity or its size. We would never reach them, nor do we have the capacity to know each one of them as well as we need to help anyone.
In this sense, the network of agents has a very important proximity that allows us to be constantly aware of the needs of each company at all times. Then, we work together to be able to provide a coherent and comprehensive offer at all times, that is, we all handle the same solutions that exist in this country to be able to innovate, solutions such as training courses, grants, subsidies, financing, access to infrastructure, access to experts, networks… any tool already designed, or rather, deployed within this system and which is accessible to SMEs and which we have to make available to them. We have to make SMEs aware of everything that is available to them so that they do not necessarily do things autonomously or alone.
So this is a first tool, let’s say. Other tools used by this network, for example, are a methodology and systems that we have provided to be able to provide orderly advice. Innovation is about having something orderly and systematized. Innovation is a process as important as accounting, purchasing, sales or export in any company, that is, if we consider that to be competitive and sustainable you need to be in full change, it has to be an almost automated process. You have to look at what is coming, you have to interpret it, you have to develop products, you have to develop processes and offer them well to your market.
For this purpose, we have tools that allow us to continuously and periodically collect information from companies, to interpret it very well, to know what the fundamental challenges of that company are and to see what solutions we have to provide to that particular company at any given time.
Not only to inform, but to accompany, to take the company by the hand, if it wants to, logically, and take it to that solution. To make them open the door, to make someone attend them, to make someone offer them the best help, the best financing, the best product to be able to innovate. That is a very important tool that we have.
And I would mention as a last resource that all the solutions and practical cases, real experiences that exist in the country today, we have collected them in a digital platform that we have called Innovation Map, where SMEs, in this case autonomously, can use a search engine to find more than 1,200 solutions and more than 250 cases that already exist in this country so that everyone knows how they can innovate, what they can innovate and, most importantly, what benefits they can get from it.
What programs or actions are you working on for the near future?
We are working, for example, to bring together those SMEs that have never had the possibility or never had the strength or incentive to innovate.
We have a program called Hazinnova, with which we collaborate with the Basque government, with SPRI, eminently aimed at those SMEs that have to take that first step. Sometimes it is not easy, as I said before. Innovating is easy conceptually, but it is complicated when it comes to deployment.
What this program allows us to do is to provide assistance, not monetary assistance, but a specialized service so that, in the challenge that the company chooses, where it knows it has a more important need, we can give it that first boost.
We give a series of expert hours that help to take the first step to start walking. It is a program that we have been working on for the last five years and what we want is to give it an important continuity so that more and more SMEs join this path and begin to know everything that is available to them, the benefits of doing innovation and who knows if in ten years they will not be doing high-tech R&D thanks to the fact that someone helped them to take the bike and get on it in the first place.
We also have other important projects on the table. We have developed digital platforms to help companies in an orderly way to systematize innovation and, linking it a bit with issues that Devol is working on, to try to apply artificial intelligence to this type of tools as well.
In other words, how can we reach more SMEs with a much better knowledge of the situation of each of these companies, of their needs and offer the best solution at any given time, depending on what the company needs at that precise moment. We do not need to provide periodic consultancy services, but rather the company needs continuous support.
For this, we are exploring, applying the story to ourselves. And the fact is that we are still thirty-something people, we are an SME. How can we implement new technologies that help us to be much more efficient, bring much more wealth of information to SMEs and help them in a much more effective way?
Probably in the coming months you will see how in our advisory tools, in this innovation map and perhaps also in some of our reports, we apply these new technologies to have a greater reach and that there is no SME in this country that does not have the opportunity to be better, to have better results, to be more competitive and more sustainable thanks to Innobasque and this great tool, its network of agents, which is continuously helping them.
Tell us about Global Innovation Day, the quintessential Innobasque event.
The Global Innovation Day, I don’t remember exactly how many editions we have held, but I would dare to say more than 15, is our big event. Once a year, back in autumn, we usually bring together more than 600 people in a significant place in the country to talk about innovation and to find out, in this case, what are the fundamental trends we are experiencing, which we are all experiencing, from a business perspective, from an institutional perspective or from a social perspective, and to see what things we have to take into account, what are the challenges we have to face and how we are already facing this situation.
This year and last year we know that artificial intelligence is one of the technologies that, I was going to say, is going to change the world, but the truth is that it is already changing the world in different ways, and we are concerned about how this new technology, this plethora of new technologies, is going to impact our socio-economic fabric.
We want to know very well, in detail, not so much how to develop artificial intelligence, because we are also clear that there are great world powers such as China, the United States, probably India… that are making technological developments, but how we can, in this small country called Euskadi, which has approximately two and a half million people, take advantage of these technologies to give an almost definitive boost to many of the industries we have in the country to be differential, I was going to say much more competitive, in fact differential.
That we have the best products, that we have the best processes and, logically, also the best human capital developing it, which for me is fundamental.
At this year’s Global we will again learn about a lot of practical cases of all types of organizations, from SMEs, which are essential, to large companies, probably even educational centers, institutions… and how they are applying this artificial intelligence to open their eyes and then be able to start collaborating with many other organizations and entities that want to join this bandwagon. That is to say, how we are going to make innovation taking advantage of these important new technologies.
