BIZBarcelona - Salón Emprendedor

Andrew Winston

Andrew Winston is a great connaisseur of what exactly “going green” means. He is the founder of Winston Eco-Strategies and the author of two strategic “green” books: Green Recovery, a strategic plan for using environmental thinking to survive hard economic times, and Green to Gold, the best-selling guide to what works - and what doesn’t - when companies go green. His work consists of helping companies both large and small use environmental strategy to grow, create enduring value, and build stronger relationships with employees, customers, and other stakeholders. He has kindly answered the questions of HitBarcelona about innovation and the challenges of the cleantech sector.

- We use to think sexy innovation is the one related to new products (cf. iPad!). Is innovation in processes undervalued?

Yes, I think we often focus only on the new product/revenue-generating part of ‘innovation’, when in fact there is innovation going on in all parts of the business and in different areas of value creation. For example, companies like 3M and DuPont have cut literally billions out of their cost structures through eco-efficiency over many years. Finding new ways every year to use less energy, water, and material is innovative. Redesigning a product or process to eliminate a toxic element, and thus reducing overall risk to the business, is innovative.

- You talk about Green Recovery when companies just struggle to survive, by any means. What are the advantages of going green?

Going green creates value in a number of ways. It lowers cost structure, saving money that helps companies survive tough times, but also provides capital to reinvest in people and innovation. Seeing your business through an environmental lens is also a tremendous driver of innovation — it allows you to see the business, product, and market in a new light. And doing right by planet, people, and profits is a wonderful way to build intangible, or brand, value — in the form of customer loyalty and greater ability to attract and retain the best people.

- What are the hurdles and challenges of the Cleantech sector?

Cleantech is a very broad term and encompasses every form of new energy, efficiency-focused companies, new material technologies, and much more. There’s no one hurdle, but of course like all new sectors, there are challenges in getting the capital to get to scale. And it’s often difficult to get the buy-in needed from skeptical customers — there’s a lot of inertia in our system.

- Which is the first goal to be achieved by a company that wants to get green values?

The first step is to understand your environmental and social impacts, up and down the value chain. I suggest starting with a qualitative analysis of how the business or industry touches on, and is impacted by, big environmental challenges like climate change and water constraints. Think about what these pressures mean to your suppliers and your customers. Then embark as well on a more quantitative approach to get a baseline on carbon and other metrics, up and down the value chain. You can’t manage what you don’t measure. After that, you’ll know better where your risks and opportunities lie. It’s more than worth the upfront investment in getting smarter about your footprint.

HitBarcelona selects the world's best start-ups

Experts says good business models have three key elements that must be logically consistent with each other. These are: customer value proposition, profit formula, and key resources and processes. Bmat meet them all.

That’s the reason why the company, which is committed to developing new software products dedicated to people’s interaction to music, won the 2009 Global Entrepreneurship Competition (GEC), that offers candidates the chance to obtain financing for their projects and the opportunity to showcase their projects for investors present at HiTBarcelona

Pedro Cano, founder and CTO of Bmat, born as a commercial spin-off of the Music Technology Group, the world’s largest research lab in music and audio, underlines that the GEC was a great experience that help the company to meet its cash flow challenges and get some international buzz. Cano is convinced that the music business is reinventing itself and that this new scenario offers new opportunities to Bmat.

This year, the 22 GEC finalists come from such diverse industries as biotechnology, telecommunications, clean and renewable energies, digital animation, industrial design and finance. They have been selected by an international panel of experts chaired and directed by Jerome S. Engel, Executive Director of the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of California (Berkeley), and they will compete for the awards during the conference. The winner of GEC 2010 will be awarded €20,000 in project financing. The second and third prize winners will receive €10,000 and €5,000 respectively.

Key to unlock your business success

Analysts agree that innovation is of crucial importance in economic recovery. As businesses attempt to find growth opportunities to overcome recession, HitBarcelona wants to share and discuss the best strategies to stimulate internal R&D, incorporate competing ideas, attract investment finance and be successful.

Which are the best options to consider? Is Corporate Venturing, that is investing in external start-ups, the best way to incorporate innovation right now? HitBarcelona has invited leading companies to explain how Corporate Venturing can be used to generate organic growth within an organization. It will be in the Plenary Congress, a forum in which you will meet the people behind the most recent entrepreneurial success, who will also talk about the characteristics companies should have to attract investment to become international leaders.

Eventually, global entrepreneurs, like Dennis Crowley, Verne Harnish, Gurbaksh Chahal or Marcos Cuevas will share the key elements that have made them succeed. The rendez-vous is the 16th June. They will be there, will you?

Aaron Patzer (image from twitter.com/apatzer)

He says “most people who are rich are not rich because they have flashy careers. They are rich because they were very methodical about their saving.” That might be the reason why, in 2007, he built a personal finance tool with a simple interface, easy to understand and use, which added its one millionth user 18 months after its launch. Word of mouth spread.

Mint.com founder and former CEO Aaron Patzer is now VP and GM of Personal Finance at Intuit, after the company’s $170 million acquisition of Mint. He is 29 years old and he is convinced that the cloud is secure enough to control personal finance. And “It’s not just network security, — it’s physical security. Our servers are located in an undisclosed facility”, he states in a ZDNet interview.

Mint enables users to know how much they have, how much they owe, and where their money goes. The web-app even shows personalized ways to save and make more money. An “independent and objective view” the banks don’t have, he says, because they want to sell their own products.

Is this the future of personal finance? Are users globally ready to tell about their money on the cloud? Are smartphones the ideal devices to run this kind of personal app? Which are the potential features on mobile? These are some of the questions the entrepreneur will answer at HitBarcelona next June. It will be a great opportunity to convert money numbers into understandable words to keep in our wallet.

We were looking at new ways to tell you that Hit Barcelona is a unique global event which brings together business leaders, innovators, investors and entrepreneurs to share ideas, promote projects and redefine the keys to business success. So, we’ve tried the coolest new feature now in YouTube:

He has pointed out several times that the place where we live is not a destiny to be accepted passively but a choice that shapes everything about us. His ideas on the Creative class that fosters an open, dynamic, personal and professional environment, which in turn attracts more creative people, business and capital, have turn into global best-sellers. And for good reason.

Richard Florida is one of the world’s leading public intellectuals on economic competitiveness and cultural and technical innovation. In his latest book, Great Reset, coming out the 27th April, the professor and head of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the Rotman School of Management (University of Toronto, Canada) explains how new ways of living and working will drive post-crash prosperity. According to him, an economic convulsion—dubbed a Reset—“transforms not simply the way we innovate and produce but also ushers in a whole new economic landscape.”

In this respect, Florida is convinced that “our economic system needs to stop channeling funds into super-risky, highly leveraged, and speculative areas”. “Instead we must return to the original vision and purpose of the financial markets: supporting innovation and the growth of the real economy”, he says. He makes oneself clearer in a recent video realeased by The Wall Street Journal:

He will surely explain further on this topic at HitBarcelona, in June. 54 days left.

Thinking outside the box is not thinking out side the box (image from blindsociety.com)

Albert Szent Gyorgi, who is credited with discovering Vitamin C, stated: “Discovery is seeing what everybody else has seen, and thinking what nobody else has thought.” Easy said. Innovative thinkers are supposed to challenge dominant ideas to conceive new possibilities. In other words, to think outside the box. But how? What do we need to get into an innovation-mindset?

Jim Carroll has some interesting ideas about it. He proposes, for example, to hire people you don’t like, because “the reason you don’t like them is because they are different, and that is probably the exact reason why their ideas are important”. He also underlines that knowledge is momentary. That  means you have to be able to forget and relearn, quickly. He eventually recommends to focus firmly on the future and make things happen, which by the way means taking risks. “We’ve become too focused on managing instead of growing”, underlines the expert.

What do you think about it? Hit Barcelona has built a programme to give you the opportunity to share your point of view with other entrepreneurs and help companies with the best ideas and brightest future to meet investors willing to back them, so that they can turn their out of the box thinking into a solid business.

Dennis Crowley

“It’s a little bit of a friend finder, a little bit of a social city guide, a little bit of a game”, according to its co-founder Dennis Crowley, and the next shiny thing on the social network horizon, as stated by some analysts. Facebook and Twitter pop the “what’s up” question. Foursquare simply tells people where you are, but it has captured the attention of the social networks sphere in just a few months.

The location based social network, designed to “incent people to explore cities in ways they haven’t done before”, has already been embraced by more than 200.000 users, while marketers still ask what is all the fuss about and whether they need to pay attention.

Certainly, Foursquare isn’t the only location based network –Gowalla being its main competitor-, but Twitter wasn’t the only microblogging site on the Web horizon either. And here it is. On March 2010, the platform created by Jack Dorsey has recorded a 1,500% growth in the number of registered users and the number of its employees has grown 500%, according to the first email newsletter on the company’s progress by the website’s co-founder Biz Stone.

Some tech-bloggers think the game-like nature of Foursquare, which enable users to earn points by ‘checking in’ at various locations, is engaging enough and can drive new opportunities. For the record, The Financial Times has just signed a partnership deal with the company to let users “unlock” its paywall system when they check in at a designated spot.

What are the possibilities open up by location-based marketing? Put differently: do marketers need to start taking notice? In two years time, will people care about how many checkins they have? Is there any possibility that Foursquare become another Dodgeball, which was acquired by Google in 2005? Will it compete with Facebook if the largest social network does Geolocation right?

These are some of the questions Dennis Crowley, who has been named one of the Top 35 Innovators Under 35 by MIT’s Technology Review magazine (2005) and who is currently an Adjunct Professor at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, will answer in HitBarcelona. Not to be missed.

See you in HitBarcelona2010!

In the best-known story of Raymond Carver, What We Talk about When We Talk about Love, four characters sit around a kitchen table in the afternoon to drink gin and debate the nature of love, only to find that their ideas are wildly different.

When we talk about Innovation it is pretty much the same. An economist would say it is the actual implementation of a pretty new idea in the commercial sphere or society. A scientist would find it is a linear systemic process, with different actors. Eventually, for a manager it could be a moment of inattention of the management board. And that would explain why many great enterprises don’t innovate. Food for thought. What does Innovation mean for you? It is for sure a concept we need in order to get out of today’s economic malaise.

HitBarcelona aims to give you the hints to embrace Innovation, shaking your ideas and businesses with opinions and experiences explained by experts from around the world to help CEOs to drive the Innovation agenda and also empower Innovation workers to sustain the Innovation process. Just 67 days left to experience it. Stay tuned.

“We’re talking about an online (web-based) software/service that shows the globe with around 700 spots that represent innovation centres (nodes) spread over the five continents” http://www.intomobile.com