ESADE students and Ferran Adrià work together to bring creative process auditing to the business world

ESADE Business School and the elBullifoundation, the foundation managed by the renowned chef Ferran Adrià who has been studying innovation methodologies at elBulliLab, have organised a competition for ESADE Business School students. The aim of the competition is to analyse creative processes in the Roca company in order to describe the creativity profile and propose innovative initiatives.

‘The creative audit is a tool for enhancing efficiency in innovation and ensuring that this efficiency is long-lasting. I had often wondered why there are economic audits but no innovation audits,’ explains Ferran Adrià. According to the renowned chef, this challenge ‘enables participants to enter a new world’.

The concept of creative auditing is a novelty in the world of business and management. A team of lecturers from ESADE Business School and a team from the elBullifoundation have developed a tool to audit creative processes in business.

‘Building an innovation pyramid starts by establishing the motivation for innovation, which makes it impossible to generalise a single model of pyramid that is applicable to all firms,’ said Ferran Adrià at ESADE.

A challenge for students

The competition, called Creativity for Business Innovation Challenge (C4BI), is organised by both organisations and aimed at students at the ESADE campus in Sant Cugat. Participating in the challenge are five-person teams of students from the Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA), Master of Science (MSc), and Master of Business Administration (MBA) courses.

‘The C4BI represents a unique opportunity,’ says Josep Franch, Dean of ESADE Business School. ‘The ideal profile for this challenge is somebody with an entrepreneurial mindset who is interested in innovation processes and the development of creative skills,’ he adds.

The challenge is a voluntary and complementary activity in the official curricula of the academic programmes, and enables students to experiment with a new methodology for understanding creative and innovative processes in the business world.

Successful response

More than 300 students have enrolled and expressed interest in competing in the five-phase competition. In the final phase, after learning about the Sapiens methodology directly from the elBulli chef, participants must audit the creative process at Roca Gallery’s ‘W+W’ project using secondary data sources and expert opinions.

The collaboration between the elBullifoundation and ESADE Business School, a pioneer in this field, aims to show the value of creative process auditing as used in the elBulli restaurant and apply it to creativity and innovation processes in other businesses.

Finally, the five finalist teams (consisting of five ESADE students each) will present their findings to a group of experts at ESADECREAPOLIS in late November. The jury – consisting of Ferran Adrià, Xavier Torras (Roca Brand Communications Manager), Josep Franch (Dean of ESADE Business School), and Marcel Planellas (Professor at the ESADE Department of Strategy and General Management) – will select the winning team.

‘I do not know how to “make creativity” in the same way that I don’t know how to “make intelligence”. But the ability to be creative is something that can be enhanced after training,’ says Adrià. ‘I ignore age and gender when considering innovation at elBulli: my loyalty is to talent. A good example is the elBulli restaurant, where only three people joined the creative process in 25 years’.

ESADE and elBulli

The collaboration between ESADE and Ferran Adrià started in 2006 with a joint conference at ExpoManagement Madrid on creativity; and later with the case study ‘Ferran Adrià and elBulli’ that told the story of the restaurant (written by professors Marcel Planellas and Silviya Svejenova and recently published by Harvard Business Publishing). Similarly, ESADE faculty members Jordi Montaña and Isa Moll published in 2009 the case study: ‘Ferran Adrià and elBulli. Creativity and Innovation’.

ESADE also collaborated in the ‘Science & Cooking Lecture Series’ organised by Harvard University in May 2011; and Ferran Adrià and other chefs – including Joan Roca or Nandu Jubany – presented their main lessons and conclusions at ESADE.

The international ‘Ideas4transformation’ competition was presented at ESADE in October 2011. The competition gathered ideas about the elBullifoundation and was the result of a collaboration between Telefónica and Ferran Adrià. It was aimed at MBA students from Harvard Business School; Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley; Columbia University; London Business School; and ESADE Business School.