Over the past 10 years, according to data from the OECD, labor productivity in Spain has grown by an average of 0.64% each year. The only developed country with the lowest level of productivity growth has been Italy with 0.30%. Spain invested 1.2% of GDP in R&D in 2006, significantly below the averages of the EU27 (1.76%) and the OECD countries (2.26%). However, this represents a significant increase from the levels of the mid-90s. Both in terms of the growth in demand for jobs in the field of research and development and in the ratio of subsidies in relation to private investment, Spain leads the statistics. But to make the quantitative leap that the country needs to significantly increase labor productivity, two things are necessary:
- Transforming R&D into innovation.
- Get as many companies as possible access to R&D.
In the previous article we talked about the first problem, so in the present we will refer to how to exponentially multiply companies' access to R&D. To begin with, it is not strictly necessary for companies to internally develop sophisticated and specific scientific research capabilities. In fact, the vast majority of small businesses that make up the majority of the local economy cannot afford this luxury. Not even Procter & Gamble, a multinational with vast resources, can afford to invent internally all the innovations they need to produce every year... When the company realized this reality, back in 2000, it decided to “connect” to the world through different “networks”. To do this, he had to fight an important cultural battle since the employees were imbued with a strong culture that rejected everything “not invented by the company”. These networks have allowed P&G to make a significant quantitative leap in its innovative capacity. Uninvented innovations at P&G already represent more than 35% of the total.
Networks have the peculiarity of connecting P&G with a vast number of different people, specialists in different fields, who work in completely different environments than P&G, who come from different countries of the world, from different cultures, etc. In short, they allow the company to access an extraordinarily diverse talent pool, which multiplies the possibilities of combining ideas from different domains... one of the greatest sources of innovative ideas.
P&G has several different types of networks. To begin with, the company divides them between proprietary networks and open networks. Among the owners, there is the “network of technology entrepreneurs”, made up of 70 senior P&G people who lead the development of lists of needs and write the technological briefs that describe the problems that need to be solved and which are then transferred to the networks asking for their help. Another proprietary network is comprised of the top 15 providers. This network gives the company access to a combined staff of 50,000 researchers!
Among the open networks, the main ones are NineSigma, which was created with the help of P&G and which brings together companies that need to solve technological problems with a group of companies, universities, consultants and government and private laboratories. Any troubleshooter can submit a proposal to any problem proposed by a network company. Another network is InnoCentive, in this case developed at the initiative of Eli Lilly, and focused on solving very precisely defined and specific scientific problems. YourEncore connects companies to a network of 800 very high-profile retired scientists, who can be hired for specific assignments. Yet2.com is a company created in 2001, in which P&G participates as an investor, acting as a technology broker. When a company interested in licensing its technology arouses the interest of another company, both negotiate directly until an agreement is reached.
Being able to access this type of network greatly reduces R&D costs and exponentially multiplies the possibilities of finding correct answers and novel ideas in a fraction of the time it would take to do so using only internal capabilities.
Therefore, one of the key policies that governments should implement is to promote the creation and subsequent dissemination of technological networks such as those described above. These networks have an enormous positive effect by democratizing research and making it available to a multiplicity of small businesses, reducing cost and investment barriers.
