Esade participated in the Tech Spirit Barcelona conference: the entrepreneurial event created to compensate for the cancellation of the Mobile World Congress (MWC) and 4 Years From Now (4YFN) and in which Esade is the official collaborating academic organisation. The conference brought together more than 2,500 professionals from the sector for five days in Barcelona, and Esade played a leading role by participating in several roundtables and panels on a variety of themes.

“At Esade we are constantly working to strengthen the entrepreneurial and technological ecosystem, and therefore our participation in Tech Spirit Barcelona was a great success,” said Koldo Echebarria, director general of Esade. “Educational innovation is one of the main axes of Esade, and this combined with Esade’s global outlook, means we are committed to participating in initiatives such as 4YFN”, he added.

eSports and moonshot thinking

Sport Tech Spirit was a part of the conference that focussed on the SportTech ecosystem. Among the participants was Julio Villalobos, Esade corporate director and chief digital officer. He highlighted the enormous potential of the eSports sector and said: “The eSports market is growing in terms of business, audience, and engagement capacity. eSports are not a temporary fad and are here to stay. Brand managers who are prepared to step outside their comfort zone and discover the potential of eSports will gain a competitive advantage over other brands”. Villalobos directs a wholly online Esade executive programme entitled ‘eSports for marketing strategies’ that examines eSports as a marketing channel.

Ivan Bofarull, chief innovation officer at Esade, held a session on how moonshot thinking can be a tool to lead disruption. Moonshot thinking is a mental model of prioritising improvements that seem unachievable (10x) rather than incremental improvements (10%). For Bofarull: “constant disruption is a new normal that organisations must learn to accept. This is largely due to the ability of entrepreneurs to create new companies and business models by accessing almost infinite resources and new combinations of technologies”. Bofarull suggests that managers get used to incorporating an exponential thinking layer (moonshot thinking) to complement the incremental approach. “Only by imagining 10x improvements do we force ourselves to think about how to solve a problem by rethinking it from the beginning and going beyond what exists – such as product improvements that are already on the market,” he says.

Innovation and entrepreneurship

Xavier Ferràs, professor at the Esade Department of Operations, Innovation and Data Sciences participated in the roundtable. He explains: “A guru is born or made and there are pro and anti-guru visions. Innovation must be treated systemically: it is not enough to have good entrepreneurs and good investors. A national strategy is needed with a government that leads and invests in knowledge platforms – such as biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and new materials – that enable the emergence of quality entrepreneurial initiatives”.

Ferràs also participated in the industrial entrepreneurship and technology roundtable in which the need was shown for this type of entrepreneurship “in environments where universities and research centres do excellent work”. He added: “it is crucial that deep tech companies emerge out of the research that is generated”.

Luis Vives, professor and vice dean of programmes at Esade Business School, moderated a roundtable on ‘The Role of Corporates: Investment or Market Access’ with experts from Cuatrecases Accelera, Asics, Girabau, and Zone2Boost.

Esade BAN, the Esade Alumni business angels network, contributed its knowledge on how to find financing through social capital, business angels, and venture capital.

‘Women in Tech’ female leadership 

Núria Agell, professor and director of the Esade Department of Operations, Innovation and Data Sciences organised a panel on the glass ceiling in the technology sector and the lack of female leaders. Discussion centred on challenges and solutions from a gender perspective and how to empower female leadership in digital and technological companies.