Innovation in the Canary Islands: Interview in “El Día”

El Día published yesterday the interview with me by Francisco Mesa, SC Tenerife, on the occasion of my participation in the TLP Innova, an annual meeting on innovation in the Canary Islands that was held this year under the slogan: “Entrepreneurship in the Canary Islands: Opportunities for the future”.

Historically, the economic development and progress of the Canary Islands has been highly conditioned by insularity and territorial fragmentation. Therefore, the title of the interview “We are in an era of collaboration where the important thing is to connect” and its content, summarises very well my feeling about the enormous opportunity that the Era of Collaboration represents for the Canary Islands. Just as the development of commercial aviation facilitated the birth and expansion of tourism activity in the Canary Islands. New social technologies allow the Canary Islands to overcome its historical barriers, improving territorial cohesion and its strategic positioning as an Atlantic Archipelago in a global world. Likewise, they make it possible to start a new stage of economic and social growth based on massive collaboration between islands. Promoting collaborative innovation must be a priority for all Canary Islands institutions and especially for the Island Councils, as engines of economic and social development. The starting point for this new strategy of “growing by collaborating, must necessarily be greater transparency in the management of public affairs, an essential factor to recover trust between the islands and territorial cohesion. I share the interview with you in its entirety.

Would your career in the Canary Islands have been different?

There is one aspect that would not be different if I had developed my professional career in the Archipelago: innovation as an engine of growth. People who are innovators are looking for and exploring the future and we do not only see the day to day. Somehow we realise that the future is discontinuous. What is coming is very important to us and the only possible answer is innovation. Companies, in addition to tackling the crisis by reducing costs and adjusting the operational structure to the market, it is important that they take the time to understand what is happening. Also in the Canary Islands. It will not be possible to grow again or create wealth or create employment if we are not able to connect the company, society and the Canary Islands as a whole with what is happening. What is happening is a change of era of the dimension that was the industrial era or in the Middle Ages the Gutenberg printing press.

A change of era…

We are changing the models of value creation. We are not in an industrial era where the important thing is to produce in a massive, planned and precise way. We are in an era of collaboration, where the important thing is to connect with others and participate in this new global ecosystem where there are no borders or they are liquid and where there are enormous opportunities and where there is absolutely nothing that says that they cannot be taken advantage of in the Canary Islands. The historical limitations of the Archipelago are insularity and fragmentation. Social technologies precisely allow these historical problems to be solved.

Are our barriers to access related to living on islands?

I am from the Canary Islands and I have lost my accent over time, but I believe that fragmentation does us more harm than insularity. In other words, what happens here does not happen there and if it is done here, no one else does it and, therefore, we do not have a common political will to really have a single Canary Islands for everyone. This fragmentation in management is what prevents us from being large enough and having a critical mass to address the opportunities of our time. To the extent that we can build a more transparent society and governments, we will be able to rebuild trust.

There are regions in the world that build products at a lower cost…

It is often a misperception. The reality is that when you look around you is that we build companies that are very similar in their people, structures, products… They have very little differentiation. Precisely when it comes to competing today and being able to achieve an advantage in prices or services, you necessarily have to innovate and be more creative than others. It is part of the opportunity. The human capital of the Canary Islands is high, we have two universities, access to technology, a ZEC area, communications and logistics because we have an enviable strategic position. It is more a fear of being located in our comfort zone wanting what comes to be the same as what left. The opportunity lies precisely in reinventing ourselves. If what is coming is discontinuous, what we know is more important than what we do not know. To understand the world to come we need to develop new perspectives. Have new experiences. In this way we can create a new reality for the Canary Islands.

The crisis helps change

For people to change, three conditions have to be met. First, the need for change. Innovation and globalisation have achieved this. Secondly, we must be convinced that we have the resources. The crisis gives us the third condition, the motivation we need to improve our employability and the services of our companies. It helps us to use the social web to size new markets that we were not taking advantage of. The crisis pushes us out of our comfort zone. I think we are all aware that the world to come is more complex, necessarily more uncertain and necessarily also more volatile than the previous one and we cannot continue to address the problems of this world with the tools of the past. That is why it baffles us. That is why we see that our leaders do not have the answers and are not able to adapt to the speed of what is coming. In short, the bad news is that we have to change and the good news is that we have the tools, the technology and we only lack the political will to do so.