Professor Carlos Osorio: A look from Santiago de Chile/Boston at the success of innovation in the Basque Autonomous Community

This article was translated by John R. Bopp

Carlos Osorio is a professor at Adolfo Ibáñez University, a private college in Chile.  He has one of those seemingly infinite résumés:

He’s a visiting professor at Deusto Business School, and currently is on sabbatical as an International Faculty Fellow at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he’s working alongside the vice-dean for Action Learning.  Carlos has been a faculty associate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the University of Harvard (2012-2014), visiting research scientist at the MIT Medialab (2001-2002), and research associate of the Information Technologies Group at the Center for International Development at the University of Harvard (2001-2002), as well as guest lecturer at the Amsterdam Business School

As you can see, right now “he’s on sabbatical as an International Faculty Fellow at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he’s working alongside the vice-dean for Action Learning.”  This means that his take on the economy of the Basque Autonomous Community (BAC), published in “Economía y Negocios” in the Chilean daily El Mercurio, was seen while working and researching at that US university.

It’s only six and a half lines of text, plus the title.  But those are six and a half very valuable lines (how I envy his succinctness).  It’s a perspective on what economy and innovation are in this part of the Land of the Basques, a description of our reality, which is added to many others that we’ve been collecting that discuss the positive evolution in the last thirty years in the BAC.  Find them here, here, and here.

Certainly, the words dedicated to the effort we’re making to innovate are part of the key core of this small text, but the author, knowing his readers are not familiar with the Basque reality, makes sure they understand by placing it in an extremely clear international economic context:

If it were a sovereign economy, its per-capita GDP in 2015 would have taken 25th place, just below Israel and above Japan and South Korea.

The only thing he didn’t do was explain how that year’s GDP compares with 35 years ago, when you would have had to go a lot lower on the list to find the BAC’s place were it a “sovereign economy”.

Many people and institution in the world have observed the “Basque case”, which, in our country, some still deny the evidence, calling everything that doesn’t fit in their apocalyptic vision of reality “lies” (probably because they have the erroneous belief that this success would only highlight their failure).  This is one, only one, of the problems of believing you hold the absolute truth.

Economía y Negocios – 5/10/2016 – Chile

Innovación en el País Vasco

Desde el 2006 que investigo cómo se hace innovación en el País Vasco ¿Qué tiene de especial, y por qué vale la pena conocerlo? Es la comunidad autónoma con el mayor Índice de Comportamiento Innovador en España que en 2015 era de un 0.67, un 48% superior al promedio de la nación. Se escapa de la media en el aporte promedio de la innovación al resultado del negocio de sus empresas y, si fuera una economía soberana, su PIB per cápita el 2015 habría ocupado el lugar 25 a nivel mundial, justo por debajo de Israel y por sobre Japón, Corea del Sur. Porque han entendido que la innovación es la única respuesta adecuada a la incertidumbre, que el foco en eficiencia te puede matar, y que la diferenciación mediante apuestas radicales es imprescindible.

(Continue) (Automatic Translation)