Presentation of the INTEC 2022 report "Ten technologies to drive Spain forward".
Ten technologies to boost Spain
Summary:
On 23 November 2022, the presentation of the INTEC 2022 report "Ten technologies to boost Spain" took place at the Rafael del Pino Foundation, with the participation of Javier García Martínez, president of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry and Professor Rafael del Pino; Manuel de León, research professor in mathematics at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and full member of the Royal Academy of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences; Emma Fernández, independent director of the corporations Axway, Metrovacesa, Openbank and GIGAS; and Fernando Temprano, founder of Talantia and expert in R&D and innovation and technology management.
The event began with a speech by Javier García, who presented the report. According to García, technology is the opportunity for Spain because, when there is uncertainty, countries with greater technological diversity, more based on knowledge, are more resilient. We have seen this since the 2007 crisis, in which the countries that responded better and emerged stronger were those that had diverse economies, that were committed to innovation, in terms of the amount of money and the quality of how the factors of innovation are integrated. If it were that easy, all countries could do it. How do we make the knowledge and talent we have in our country improve the quality of life of our citizens, the quality of our employment and strengthen our collective sector? Companies compete with the talent they have.
The ten technologies to drive Spain forward start with technology for the detection of resistant bacteria. The United Nations and the World Health Organisation are reminding us year after year that the greatest health threat to the planet is antibiotic resistance. If we didn't have antibiotics against bacteria, a lot of people would die. Today we are seeing that bacteria are becoming more and more resistant to antibiotics, mainly because of the overuse of antibiotics. New strategies need to be developed. What we propose are techniques to identify those bacteria that are more dangerous, with new sensors, with new techniques. It costs more to develop a new antibiotic, about 1.7 billion euros and two years of work, than to put a rocket in space. The investment is enormous and bacteria evolve much faster than we do, so we have to find alternatives. That's why we have put the emphasis on knowing the enemy.
Another technology that is fundamental, because of how Spain is changing, because of how our cities are growing, is intelligent mobility. This is an issue that is still pending, which is excessively politicised and in which experts need to provide us with different alternatives, in which there is electrification, but also mathematics, algorithms, to better understand the options we have to move around in a more sustainable way and to ensure that there is no part of the population that cannot move around due to problems of mobility, access, access to key areas. Many people are discriminated against and cannot access services because they cannot move around in the cities we have built. This must be a critical element in the debate.
Much of the energy transition is based on elements that we do not have, or have very little of. Some elements, like lithium, are concentrated in very few countries and we may have problems with potential cartels like OPEC. But with others, we simply don't have enough. There is not enough platinum to put in car catalytic converters. The solution may be new batteries based on sodium, or magnesium, replacing lithium. These technologies are based on abundant elements, but they do not yet give us the results of the platinum group. Much of chemistry is based on working with abundant elements, such as iron or sodium, to get similar yields. What we recycle well, such as aluminium or glass, is abundant. What is scarce, the elements that are in our mobile phones, such as vanadium or tungsten, are impossible to recycle. That is where the big challenge lies.
Another technology, which has been widely recognised, is the use of mathematics for a more sustainable world. Sometimes we don't know how to make the connection between mathematics and a more sustainable world. But only with algorithms are we going to know the world better and find solutions that are not obvious to the big problems we have. Sometimes it means making more sense of the data we have, but also better analysing realities such as climate change, or seeing how different measures are going to give one result or another thanks to advances in artificial intelligence and computation. Spain is a leader in this area.
The next technology is the metaverse. Have a form of Second Life 2.0, be it a different augmented reality, it is true that increasingly there is going to be an industry that is not going to be in the physical, but in the virtual. The missing part of the metaverse is how to integrate biology, the emotional, the human. One of the unfinished business of the metaverse is sustainability. It is not only the energy expenditure, but these huge screens, visors, wearables, depend on very scarce elements, some of them toxic.
We wanted to highlight smart fertilisers as one of the technologies. It is important that these new fertilisers are available, that they respond to the demand of the soil and that they are not used in an overabundant way. The problem we are seeing with the Mar Menor is that there is an excessive abuse of fertilisers that are very cheap, that improve the productivity of the fields, but when the rains come, they reach the Mar Menor. Smart fertilisers are encapsulated by nanotechnology. These capsules open according to changes in soil composition. In the same way that personalised medicine releases the medicine only in the tumour, artificial fertilisers also respond to such stimuli, so that they only open if the plant needs more nitrogen or phosphorus. This is possible and desirable because less fertiliser use saves natural gas and generates less CO2. This is a great opportunity that is fundamental for Spain, not only because of the weight of agriculture in our economy, but also because we have a large fertiliser company that has always been in Spain because gas came from Africa at a very good price.
Another technology, closely related to this and nanomedicine, is theranostic materials. These are materials that, at the same time as they detect a tumour, a disease, are capable of releasing a drug. This is important because one of the great advances in nanomedicine is that it is relatively easy to deliver nanoparticles to tumours, for example, to detect breast cancer. The breakthrough in recent years is that in this particle that allows us to improve nuclear magnetic resonance is that they can be capsules that open up and release a very powerful drug - which if released in indiscriminate quantities would have terrible side effects - that is released only in the tumour and with a miniscule concentration, the concentration necessary to kill the tumour. This is giving great results and, in Spain, with such an ageing population, this is key, in addition to large research groups.
The next technology is robots. There is a whole new family of robots, for example, swarms of robots that can treat diseases, or interact with certain surfaces. There is also a new generation of soft robots, more like an organism, that can interact, adapt, move and can even circulate inside our veins and perform operations when there is thrombosis, when there are circulation problems. This year there was a robot that, for five days, was able to carry out all the operations of a laboratory, such as tensing, separating, discovering new chemical compounds, in isolation, without human intervention. We are going to see a whole new dimension of robots.
The penultimate technology is the tourism of things. We are familiar with the internet of things, that the objects around us interact with us, are able to connect us to the network. Imagine what this means for the travel experience, from the moment you start to imagine the trip, enter the computer, buy the tickets, the virtual experience of the hotel, of the city you might be in. Then, when you are actually travelling, interacting with a painting, a castle or a cathedral, learning new things. And when he comes back he tells on social networks everything he has done. It's about putting all this technology into the whole travel experience, because in Spain it is key and we thought it went far beyond smart tourism because it emphasises things, what surrounds us when we are travelling, and how it connects it with that visual experience, with the metaverse. If we don't do that, we will continue to compete with Turkey and Tunisia.
The latest technology is CO2 capture and transformation. It is a paradigm shift, a change in thinking, because CO2 is one of the big problems we have. A large part of climate change is due to CO2 emissions. For some time we have been thinking about how to reduce emissions, improving the efficiency of chemical processes. We have also been thinking about capturing it. But now there is something new. CO2 is like a rock, it's the residue of combustion, it's completely stable, and we can turn it into all sorts of useful things. We can turn it into solar fuels, we can turn it into jet fuels. This is being scaled up in Madrid, at IDEA Energy. Even more surprisingly, with sunlight CO2 can be transformed into all kinds of hydrocarbons. You can also generate monomers for plastics.
The urgency is that others are moving ahead of us. When you move ahead, you run the risk of not seeing where the other runners are. In China, they are aware that they generate much of the best science in the world. Now, one of their priorities is to make the transformation that South Korea and Japan carried out, to stop producing cheaply and produce high technology because that is what is going to define the next century. Spain generates some of the best knowledge in the world and we are making progress, but we have to see how fast others are advancing. Spain has lost eight points in ten years in the economic complexity indicator. We are the thirty-second country in terms of economic complexity. We are very good in the fields we are in, but the point is that just as the ten most important companies on Wall Street today are completely different from the ten companies at the beginning of the 2000s, in Spain the large companies on the Ibex at the beginning of the 2000s are the same as the ones we have now. That's not a problem, that's fine. The problem is how fast the others are changing. We have not fallen eight positions because we are not innovating. We are doing it, but others are doing it faster.
If we do not act, we will not be able to maintain the welfare state. Our income and labour costs are already at the European average. But if we cannot compete with our peers, those who pay like us and have the same costs as us, we will not be able to pay those wages, that welfare state. That is why innovation is a question of the economic security of the country. If you produce what is at the top of the value scale, you get little benefit, because it is not economically complex. It is fantastic that Spain produces renewable energies and takes them to Germany. But if we use the electrons produced in Spain to manufacture high value-added molecules, we will not sell Germany the cheap raw materials so that they can sell us the expensive chemical products we need. Moreover, Spain has a highly developed chemical industry, seven hundred thousand direct and indirect jobs, 5.6% of GDP, large chemical companies. The raw material of the future is going to be electors and photons. Let us not sell it to others. Let's take advantage of all the wealth the country has to produce these goods here.
A country that lacks an exciting common project is not attractive. What unites a country is a common project. Science, technology and innovation can be that project. A project that is not unknown to Spain. It is what drove the silver age of science in Spain, what moved Blas Cabrera, Enrique Moles, the great scientists, few, who thought of a Spain of knowledge a hundred years ago. Technologies are all well and good, but for them to become reality we need people who are willing to take risks.
This was followed by a round table discussion in which, in addition to Javier García, Manuel de León, Emma Fernández and Fernando Temprano took part.
Emma Fernández: We have a country that is in a geographical area, Europe, that runs less than other geographical areas. Innovation intensity does not reach 3%. We are still at 2.32%. When we look at the Spanish case, we are around 1.4%. This is particularly low in our companies, where there are two circumstances. One of them is size. We have a fairly small company structure where it is proving quite difficult to incorporate innovation and new ways of doing things. The human capital we have in our companies has low scientific and technological knowledge. In Europe, approximately 20% of companies have professionals with digital knowledge, while in Spain we are at 16%. An additional problem is the culture of irrigation and innovation, which is not enough, especially in large corporations. Companies innovate when they have innovative customers. Having a customer who demands, who forces you to bring state-of-the-art products to the table and to position yourself in a differential way allows you to generate internationally competitive products. Because the other big problem that Spanish companies have not yet solved is that the innovation market is an international market. We have improved a lot in the international projection of Spanish companies, but we need to do more.
Manuel de León: Applying for a European project is not a problem of ambition, but of management. To get involved in a project of a certain size, you need managers to help you prepare it, and this is something that is lacking in Spain. Universities hardly have any managers to help you present yourself or look for partners to undertake a venture bigger than your own laboratory or research team. It happens in both research centres and universities and it is the fear of having to deal with a series of forms or regulations, which makes you panic a bit about doing these things because they seem complicated, but then they are not. With managers who would help to do that, more projects would be obtained.
The big boom in mathematics is artificial intelligence, which is now called machine learning, and which uses mathematics and statistics, which have to do with the creation of algorithms. In Spain, this is another problem we have, that we need to set up more multidisciplinary teams, more ambition, more institutional support, so there are few mathematicians working on it. We need to see how to handle the huge amount of data that is generated in order to identify patterns and use them to your advantage. That is what mathematics is now contributing to technological invention. That is why we have a boom in mathematics, but it is fatal to push this type of action from the universities. There is also an inertia not to do it because purists don't see it as a good thing. In France, the report on the economic impact of mathematics says that, in order to make the most of our talent, we must understand that mathematics is indispensable for innovation and conditions our place among the technological leaders of the millennium. The report goes on to say that France's national sovereignty rests, more than ever, on its mathematical sovereignty. I wish something similar could be said in Spain.
Fernando Temprano: Being in a place where things happen means that there are stimuli, discussion, competition, examples, a whole set of qualities that are not related to dedicating more or fewer resources. There is an underlying theme, a culture, a way of thinking and a will, for example, in Israel. Deep in their ecosystem there was a will to do well as a consequence of the will to survive as a society. When you have that will and you face competition, you have a different spirit to achieve things, which leads to the fact that when you compete hard, you don't get there alone. You have to create an ecosystem as the only way to go very fast. Right now, the important thing in this society of constant change, which is going very fast, is not to have brilliant ideas, but to generate ideas faster than others and to implement them. That is the model, which is complex, with background elements that are sometimes taken into account from the point of view of business, academia and politics.
Javier García: We need new forms of leadership. The current leaders are not up to the task, they are incapable of reaching agreements, not only at COP-27 but also at the G-20. The big tech companies that made us great promises are firing thousands of people without giving an explanation, just with a tweet. Therefore, we need a new leadership, not only technological, but also human. The more technological our society is, the more human education has to be, in values, with a new kind of leadership from the conversation, because all these changes involve society. We need a new narrative because this is not working.
Emma Fernández: We live in an increasingly dual world, where there are very good things, but, unfortunately, many gaps have opened up that we are not being able to manage and that are causing many people to fall by the wayside. In one of the ecosystems that we have in Spain, in which there are about a hundred entrepreneurs who have raised, this year alone, one and a half billion euros in their companies, and who already generate three hundred thousand direct and indirect jobs and have five unicorns on the list. Those values that Fernando was talking about were there: large corporations with great leaders who dedicate part of their time to these entrepreneurs; large national and international knowledge institutions that allow them access to knowledge, and a network of companies in which everyone helps each other, which makes it possible to do exceptional things. There are many people who are contributing through leadership. But we are in a world where we have moved from complicated to complex, and complex means that it is very difficult to solve everything with the same recipe. We are still in a world where we do not dare to segment policies. We are still in a world of coffee for all and it cannot be coffee for all. Inequalities are only going to be solved by making specific policies for certain segments of the population, or for certain types of companies in each sector, even if the others do not benefit. We continue with coffee for all and we want a linear increase of 4% for all, instead of differentiating between those who contribute more in order to increase it more. This culture is not yet sufficiently developed.
Javier García: Another fundamental issue for leadership is that it is leading for a reality that no longer exists. The nation state of the 19th century is no longer the state of today. The problems we face are different, climate change, the energy reality. Business leaders are used to being accountable to shareholders, not to customers or society. They are not leading for the underlying reality, which is the individual, who may feel more or less identified with the nation state, with the company or with the shareholder. This is where things are changing faster than the structures we have equipped ourselves with to lead organisations or countries. The problems we face are common, but then states are faced with national realities that have nothing to do with what we are trying to solve.
Manuel de León: The 2030 Agenda is not just a pin you put on your lapel. It is the seventeen sustainable development goals in which all these technologies are fundamental to respond to these challenges. The 2030 Agenda is from 2015, seven years ago, and we have been lost for seven years because it has not taken hold in society. Politicians approve these things, but then they don't implement them, or they don't implement them as they should be implemented. A committee for technology and science has been set up in Parliament and has produced four reports. What are the consequences of these reports? We do not know.
Javier García: Science should not make the decisions, but it has to be at the table where decisions are made. The reality is that during Covid we were told that there was a commission of experts, as in other countries, but we still don't have that tool. There is no scientific advisor to the government as there is in other countries. We often think that science is going to solve our problems, but what science gives us are solutions and then humans have to make decisions. But that is what we struggle with. Now is the time of the citizen/consumer. Every time we consume, every time we act in social networks, we have the capacity for leadership. This is the new form of leadership, much more from the individual, to take that leadership capacity instead of waiting for problems to be solved and blaming others. We have to assume that protagonism and take back leadership from the citizenry.
Fernando Temprano: Leaders are using mental models from a previous reality. But the complexity of the world has increased so much that mental models have to be changed in order to manage this. One possible solution is public debate based on facts. Politicians make decisions based on political positions, not on data. There is a competition crisis effect which is what makes you change. It is crises, competition, that kind of thing, that forces change. A company president asked me to help him with innovation issues, with change. I replied that it depended on the answer to two questions. The first is: are you personally going to lead innovation and change? You don't do that with an innovation department. It is done from the top down. He said yes. Second question: are you going to manage all the conflicts that you are going to generate as a consequence of committing to innovation? Because innovation is change. Change clashes with ways of thinking and doing and with the interests of the status quo. For change to occur there has to be someone in the company concerned about its future who, from the leadership, takes the decision to start to change.
Javier García: Therein lies the risk of using European funds to outsource innovation. How many cases are we seeing of outsourcing the digitalisation of companies without making changes in people. This is bound to fail.
Emma Fernández: We still have an education with a language deficit, which, unfortunately, is increasingly local. This means that our managers are less exposed to the international world than in other cultures. In Spain, professional careers are very vertical, following a single path, which means that people reach the top and are still unable to interact. In the United States, mobility between positions is obligatory, you are obliged to leave your country, to change position every so often to another part of the organisation. In Spanish multinationals this is less frequent. Therefore, when the moment of truth arrives, you find yourself with professionals with less experience in this internationalisation process.
Javier García: There are not more Spaniards in international bodies because they do not see the advantage of being in them, because their market is national. Getting involved in the difficulties of the international arena is complex and they don't do it. This is where we are losing an opportunity because Spain, due to its connection with Latin America, with the Arab world, with our narrative as an open country and with the Spanish language, could be key. Portugal is an example in this respect; it is over-represented in international organisations. We lack the understanding that the big decisions are taken outside, even though our market is here. International trade, climate change, all these decisions are taken outside.
Manuel de León: This opportunity is not seen by those who manage, which is very important because that is where decisions are made that then set the trends. The government does not support it.
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.
