Luis Pérez-Breva Keynote Lecture

On 3 May 2017, the Rafael del Pino Foundation organised the Keynote Lecture "Innovar: Un manifiesto de acción" (Innovating: A manifesto for action) given by Luis Pérez-Breva on the occasion of the publication of his latest book of the same title.

Luis Pérez-Breva is an expert in the practice and development of innovation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). An innovator and entrepreneur, Pérez-Breva has guided more than 170 MIT new technology projects to discover opportunities to realise MIT's mission of making a positive impact on our society and has trained, mentored, coached and educated more than 200 teams of entrepreneurs and innovators around the world.

He currently directs MIT's flagship programme in applied innovation, the MIT Innovation Teams: a joint programme and course at MIT's School of Engineering and School of Business. He has recently co-led the innovation arm of MIT's partnership with Russia to create a new university model based on training innovators (MIT Skoltech Initiative) and is also collaborating on several such international initiatives in Portugal, Singapore and Abu Dhabi.

In the last decade, Dr. Pérez-Breva has developed his activity all over the world, through courses, programmes and projects aimed at transforming professionals from any field and students from any discipline into professional innovators prepared to innovate in any field and from any starting point: be it ideas, new or existing technologies, presentiments, real problems, etc.

His new book Innovating: A Doer's Manifesto for Starting from a Hunch, Prototyping Problems, Scaling Up, and Learning to Be Productively Wrong (MIT Press 2017) reached "#1 hot new release" status on Amazon on the same day of its publication and explains how to become that professional innovator. The translation of the book into Spanish is in progress with the preliminary title "Innovar: Una manifiesto de acción".

With this book Luis Pérez-Breva changes the meaning of the word innovation. Where others confuse entrepreneurship, entrepreneurs, entrepreneurship, and innovation, warn of the danger of disruption, or describe innovators as a kind of preternatural beings, Pérez-Breva speaks of solving real problems, of learning, of exploring the seemingly impossible, and of the possibility of building the world the reader imagines with the means at hand. Innovation is not a process, nor a product; it is an action and a skill that can be learned and practised. The book is the fruit of a decade of experience demonstrating in both academic and business settings, all over the world and with thousands of people, another way of understanding innovation: without complexes, without jargon, as a discipline in itself, practical and practicable, that defines the explorer of the 21st century.

Dr. Pérez-Breva holds degrees in Chemical Engineering, Business, Physics, and Artificial Intelligence obtained in Spain (Institut Quimic de Sarrià), France (Ecole Normale Supérieure), and USA (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). As an innovator and entrepreneur, he has specialised in conceiving and developing new artificial intelligence technologies that solve real problems. He has worked on technologies for mobile phone location in emergencies and national security applied today all over the world, in Genetics, in Finance, in Health Sciences, and has created or collaborated with several organisations for social purposes, including a new university focused on innovation. In 2011, the Spanish Government recognised his contributions to innovation and the internationalisation of Spanish talent with the Order of Civil Merit.

Summary:

On 3 May 2017, the Rafael del Pino Foundation organised the conference "Innovar: un manifiesto de acción", given by Luis Pérez-Breva on the occasion of the presentation of his book "Innovation". Luis Pérez-Breva, director of the MIT Innovation Teams, began his speech by pointing out that 20% of the ideas that pass through his course end up becoming projects, to then indicate that he wrote the book because the audiences of his public interventions always ask him two questions: when will I be able to make an elevator pitch and when will I be able to do a market analysis. The problem with these questions is that people often confuse market analysis with innovation. There are many success stories about innovators, their beginnings and their successes. But no one talks about what lies between a disruptive idea and success. That gap is defined by what you don't know and how many times you get it wrong. From there, what you have to understand when it comes to innovation is that the process is like a person learning. Nothing in this part of the story is predictable. The book, therefore, focuses on three fundamental ideas: how innovations begin, exploring what it means to be wrong, and whether one innovates to grow or grows by innovating. On the first question, Pérez-Breva warned that the beginnings of innovations are less glamorous than they seem. To illustrate this, he gave the example of the first laser that was built, in which all the materials it was made of came from other instruments and were being reused. From this, he concludes that society is not realising how to innovate. In relation to the second question, Pérez-Breva stated that innovators are explorers who feed on the mistakes they make, on being productively wrong. Being right is quite difficult because you can't prove that something can work until you build it and test it. So the ways in which you can fail are not predictable. Finally, to answer the question of whether you innovate to grow or grow by innovating, Pérez-Breva gave the example of some successful companies, which started by creating a company to learn from, then a bigger one, then another one, and then another one. The first of these is a prototype of what the company will later become. The new business is a spin-off of the old one and the old one finances the new one. This is the case with Netflix or Amazon, he explained. The risk with all this is to let the idea dazzle you and not allow you to learn anything.

The Rafael del Pino Foundation is not responsible for the comments, opinions or statements made by the people who participate in its activities and which are expressed as a result of their inalienable right to freedom of expression and under their sole responsibility. The contents included in the summary of this conference, written for the Rafael del Pino Foundation by Professor Emilio González, are the result of the debates held at the meeting held for this purpose at the Foundation and are the responsibility of the authors.

The Rafael del Pino Foundation is not responsible for any comments, opinions or statements made by third parties. In this respect, the FRP is not obliged to monitor the views expressed by such third parties who participate in its activities and which are expressed as a result of their inalienable right to freedom of expression and under their own responsibility. The contents included in the summary of this conference, written for the Rafael del Pino Foundation by Professor Emilio J. González, are the result of the discussions that took place during the conference organised for this purpose at the Foundation and are the sole responsibility of its authors.

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