ESADE University

Today we visited the ESADE university, with a special look at their Rambla of Innovation housed in the high-tech Creapolis building. ESADE is a prestigious international university that hosts about 2,000 MBA, MSc, and BBA

students, where their goal is to meet the challenges of globalization and the digital revolution in innovative ways. To that end, the Rambla of Innovation was created as five laboratories that are all components of the value chain below.

Retrieved from http://www.esade.edu/en/ramblaofinnovation/

Students and companies can begin innovating at any point in the chain, but the five labs follow an idea through implementation. The first lab is the Fusion Point where new ideas are created to meet the needs of company challenges. The second lab is the Decision Lab where facilities include a place for students to conduct quanta give and qualitative research. The FabLab is the third space dedicated to manufacturing prototypes. The fourth and fifth lab are the EGarage and EWorks where entrepreneurs can share their business opportunities and get guidance from professors for a clear plan and implementation.

Before touring all the labs, we sat for two lectures that opened my eyes to the vastly different perspectives of Marketing in Spain. Our first guest speaker was Professor Ferran Blanch who stressed that the key to Marketing is finding the consumer need and satisfying that need. It was especially enlightening when he made the point of looking at the Futbol Club Barcelona as a competitor to Netflix, because they compete for how people choose to satisfy their need for entertainment. By segmenting consumers based on their needs before the demographic or psychographic information, companies can use their Marketing dollars more efficiently to meet those needs.

The second speaker, Professor Javier Aguilar, was a self-confessed serial entrepreneur of service based businesses. He walked us through some of the businesses that have been successful and those that have failed, and the lessons he's learned. One particularly striking observation from Prof. Aguilar’s experience was his ability to identify opportunities to meet a business need, and the speed at which he wa able to gather the resources to set up the business. I believe his ability to quickly act on opportunities contributes largely to the success of his companies. He had good ideas for all of the companies he created, but he warned that the businesses that failed could've been avoided if he had researched more on consumer needs or been more honest with his business partners.

After the delicious tapas lunch in the Creativity Room, a space designed to stimulate creative thinking, we heard from Oriol Acoba, the Director of the Creapolis and the CEO of Kernel. The Director of the Creapolis is very proud of how the Rambla of Innovation is growing and becoming a resource for companies to come to Barcelona and use the lab space. There are more than 60 companies using spaces in the Creapolis, and one company Kernel, is making strides in the field of neuro-strategy thanks to the technology available in the labs. The CEO spoke about their use of technology in recording the subtle changes in a person’s face when taking a survey to distinguish the subconscious reactions from the conscious decisions. It is fascinating to see how a machine processes the human face to determine the difference between how a consumer says they will decide on a brand, and then how their mind is actually processing that decision.

At the conclusion of the evening, there were many takeaways for how ESADE is committed to fostering an environment for innovation. Even the approach to Marketing and entrepreneurship is a different perspective compared to the US. My greatest takeaway was defining business as consumer needs rather than industry. Through that lens, I see competition between companies where I didn't see before, such as in the need to satisfy transportation, Uber becomes a competitor to car dealerships and mass transportation. When consumers are faced with many choices to satisfy a need, a company will only be successful against their competition if they can meet and exceed customer expectations.