Humanity is humanity because of technology. Whoever masters technology will master humanity. It is as simple as that. Technology lies behind the caves of Altamira, the bow and arrow, the Gutenberg Bible and the digital newspaper. Behind the computer, the iPhone and social media. It is in the clothes we wear, the food we eat and the energy we consume. If there is one thing that genuinely sets us apart from other living beings, or even from other, “less advanced” human societies, it is technology. And the most unsettling lesson History has left us is that the future will belong to those who create, own or master the latest technology. Do we want to be masters of our future, or be dragged along by it? Where do we stand, and what can we do?
Who dominates technology today? If we want a sense of where things stand, we can approach the question from several angles. A glance at the “Bloomberg Innovation Index” reveals some figures I find interesting. Finland has more people working in R&D than anyone else: 7,482 per million inhabitants, to be precise. Next comes the United States, a long way behind (3,979). South Korea tops the patents ranking, with Japan, China, the US and Germany filling the next four places. Of the 10 largest technology companies by market capitalisation, only one is not American. Ring a bell? Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, Google, Facebook, Oracle, Qualcomm, Intel and IBM. The only outsider is Tencent (China). The index, as good or as bad as any other, combines six factors (R&D, Manufacturing, Hi-Tech Companies, Education, Researchers and Patents). It places Spain 23rd, below Germany, Finland, Sweden, France, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands and Ireland, to name only our European peers. Look a little closer and what the index is telling us is that with better R&D, more people devoted to research and more patents, we would be considerably higher up the table. At bottom, these three elements may well be different faces of the same coin. Even the fourth factor that drags us down, the lack of Hi-Tech companies, could be a consequence of insufficient drive on the other three.
What can we do? Let them invent? Do we give up on being masters of our future? The other day I heard a rock-and-roll singer whose songs I follow say that everyone should be able to be master of their own destiny. In my view, one is master of one’s own destiny when one is in a position to say no and accept the consequences of that decision. Are we? If we are not part of the leading pack of those who master technology, being masters of our destiny looks rather like utopian do-goodery. Where and how is this technology cooked up? I suspect everyone has Silicon Valley on their list of candidates.
I recommend an interesting analysis on the subject by Deloitte University Press entitled “How to innovate the Silicon Valley way”. That it is an undisputed source of technological innovation worldwide, nobody questions. But what makes it so? Chief among the reasons is an ecosystem that includes world-class universities, technology giants, an abundance of venture capital and a breeding ground for fiercely competitive talent that celebrates successes and (this is important) failures alike.
Beyond Silicon Valley, the world has a number of regional centres of technological excellence, or hubs. New York for financial technology (Fintech), for example, Tel Aviv for cyber-security (Cyber-Technology), Austin (US) for digital health, and so on. There are also some in Europe, in Paris, London and Berlin. What do they have that we lack? First, the will to create. Things do not happen by spontaneous generation, and as a rule nothing happens by chance. That will must go hand in hand with great clarity about the objectives to be achieved and the direction to be taken. It is not enough to announce that one wants an innovation centre, lay the foundation stone, pose for photographs, cut a ribbon or allocate an initial budget. That alone, as we know from long experience, leads to failure, to money thrown away, to the frustration of projects begun and never finished that have caused so much anger and squandered so many resources until now.
Two different institutions (Bloomberg and Deloitte) reach similar conclusions. Without an efficient ecosystem to catalyse talent, things do not work. Do we have one in Spain? Clearly not. Could we? It is not easy, but as a good Galician would say, it depends. Let us briefly examine what has worked elsewhere and see whether it can be applied here, or, by extension, in Europe.
Let us start with the Universities, which are supposed to be among the sources of talent and research that feed a good technology ecosystem. Let us see what they have over there, and what we have here. Within Silicon Valley’s sphere of influence stand Stanford University (the second best in the world according to the QS World University Rankings 2016-2017) and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech, number 5 in the same ranking). I could also mention Berkeley or UCLA (of which I have fond memories). Some figures for comparison. Stanford has 4,140 faculty, practically half of them international. It has some 15,000 students, almost 3,500 of whom are international. In Spain, the average share of international students does not exceed 3%, according to UNESCO. We are not talking about exchange students. We are talking about those who choose Spain to complete their entire degree. Our best university according to the Shanghai ranking, the University of Barcelona, has some 9,000 foreign students out of a total of 69,000. This year around 1,700 more are joining, over a thousand of them Erasmus or similar. If we apply the same proportion to those already enrolled, full-time students would number around 3,500, or about 5%. Well above the Spanish average, but far below Stanford’s 22%.
More crushing figures: Stanford’s faculty and alumni have founded companies that generate more than $2,700,000 million ($2.7 trillion) in annual revenue, which would make them the world’s tenth-largest economy. Stanford has produced more than 30 billionaires (still living), 17 astronauts and 20 winners of the Turing Award (the Nobel Prize of computing), as well as 60 Nobel laureates. Shall we go on comparing? Incidentally, Stanford was founded in 1885 thanks to a donation by Leland and Jane Stanford in memory of their only son, who had died of typhoid. Leland Stanford made a great fortune in railways, a contemporary of our own Marquis of Salamanca, and went on to become Governor of California and a US Senator. Sound familiar? One left us an affluent neighbourhood; the other left them a University.
The message is clear: things do not just happen. We shall leave for another day the analysis of other elements of this ecosystem, such as the venture capital required, the technology giants and the resource we have in greatest abundance: talent.
Francisco Canós
Article published on 19 April 2017 in: 
