Peninsula Corporate Innovation

Category: Blog

  • Peninsula Corporate Innovation starts to operate in China by launching an observation and scouting spot

    China is the main global catalyst regarding innovation and technological development. In this context, last 8th of December a signature ceremony was held online to open the Taicang’s High Technology Area Innovation Centre in Suzhou from the consulting firm Peninsula Corporate Innovation. He Yonglin, member of the Permanent Committee of Taicang’s Municipal Party Committee, signed the agreement with Simón Lee, Peninsula Corporate Innovation Suzhou’s director.
    Suzhou, China, 17th of February 2022 – Peninsula Corporate Innovation Suzhou will work closely with innovative companies to accelerate their development within one of the world’s top markets. China opens the door to widen and increasingly value the observation and technological scouting that accelerate clients’ innovation. Nowadays, Suzhou is the seventh Chinese city with the highest GDP right after Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Chongqing, and Tianjin. In 2025 Suzhou aims to become the world’s cradle of innovation with a deep integration between AI and real economy.
    Last 8th of December the agreement signature ceremony was celebrated remotely, with the presence of He Yonglin, member of the Permanent Committee of Taicang’s Municipal Party Committee, Peninsula Corporate Innovation Suzhou’s Managing Partner, Andrés Manso, and Peninsula Corporate Innovation’s CEO, Simón Lee.
    China, innovation leader
    Different confluences point to China as the global leader in innovation and technological development.
    One out of three unicorn companies in the world are Chinese. China represents 20% of the world’s total R+D spending, being the second biggest editor of scientific research articles and the main global provider of engineers and PhD.
    The consulting company PwC predicts that, by 2030, artificial intelligence will contribute to a 26% increase in China’s GDP. In the case of fintech, investments have fostered a rise in the value of mobile payments in China up to $790 billion; 11 times more than in the USA. In the case of electric vehicles, China is the biggest market in the world.
    In Suzhou, where Peninsula is located, there is the largest concentration of Chinese companies in the aerospace and biomedicine sectors.
    Observing to secure enterprise landing
    Entering China can be a key decision for some companies. Peninsula Corporate Innovation Suzhou will activate its observatory and technological scouting to analyse sectorial, disruptive, and cultural aspects of business success, as well as the main challenges of innovative companies in the Chinese market, regularly and in a customised way.
    At the same time, in this analysed context, Peninsula Corporate Innovation Suzhou will yield an integral enterprise landing platform in China, so companies can evolve quickly and with a minimum risk.
    About Peninsula
    The new Peninsula Corporate Innovation Suzhou centre is located 40km away from the centre of Shanghai, on the fifth floor of the German Centre building in Taicang. In its first phase, it has 2000m2 divided into 14 spaces, and the first two are already occupied by German companies. The Chinese Government has invested 1.24 million euros in this project.
    Thus, Peninsula Corporate Innovation’s consulting activity is expanded, with technological surveillance and open innovation services through programs with start-ups that facilitate the execution of pilot projects. It has over 30 entities and public agencies among its clients, and dozens of corporations, among which several IBEX35 companies: Aena, Fluidra, CaixaBank, Mapfre or Naturgy. It is the Startup Europe’s Spanish Ambassador, and it has been recognised as the fourth business entity in terms of collaboration with universities according to the UBI Index ranking.

  • Pilots: Turning failure into success

    Pilots, experiments, prototypes, tests or trials are terms that are often used to lower expectations of something or a situation that could present large doses of uncertainty. For example, at Love of Lesbian’s concert held last March, the organization and the media used the term pilot concert to refer to this event that was looking for ways to hold safe cultural events.
    Generally, as noted above, pilots limit the spread of failure in a controlled manner so we are exposed to a smaller and more controlled loss.
    Pilot or fear of failure?
    When pilots are proposed in a traditionalist business environment they can often be perceived with insecurity on the part of the promoter. That is when the factions of the fearless, the neutral and the conservative are created. All positions are correct and understandable, but it should be noted that the fear of failure is a common denominator of these factions. That unknown terrain, when the dashboard is tinted red, is a common place to end up in more scientific-technological fields.
    0 risk leads to 0 learning, and makes us less resilient to the future.
    Those who have lived through the experience of a risky project approval committee are familiar with the risks of the neutral stance. Even opting for the conservative stance carries its risks: What if the pilot turns out to be a success?
    When running away from failure becomes a continuous practice, becoming integrated into the culture of a company, is when the problem can even become lethal. Pursuing 0 risk leads to 0 learning, and with 0 learning we become less resilient to a future full of uncertainties and threats.
    Accept with humility
    In one way or another, we have all experienced pilots, experiments… but there is one hard rule we have seen throughout our experience working with large corporations: the determining factor for a pilot’s launch is to be able to start with humility, on both sides, with enough openness to be able to accept the result whatever it may be.
    It is easy to say, but this word (humility) can denote inexperience and insecurity, because it focuses attention on the project and ignores the real value in starting down a path of learning and exploration of capabilities, since corporations are not experts in a core business or segment of a client company and they are not dealing with trial and error.
    Learning from mistakes
    Another determining factor in a pilot’s launch is learning, that great word that is often used as a buffer for failure, as if the objective pursued became something secondary and not intentionally sought out.
    The only way to learn is through repetition and failure, but while humility is often perceived as insecurity, the concept of learning is perceived as a collateral benefit: It was a failure, but at least we learned.
    Do you have an innovation challenge on your hands?
    We see that companies which start pilots on a regular basis tend to have certain values ingrained in their culture: humility, learning and risk tolerance among them. These values can be a consequence of a path that companies have already started internally or that was instilled by their own founders, but change within larger companies is often not developed alone.
    Pilot to move forward
    Pilots essentially serve to validate hypotheses with the lowest possible cost and maximize learning, moving from secondary objectives to first level objectives only when they prove successful.
    A pilot should be the phase prior to deployment, when uncertainties are linked to the amount of resources needed and the mere execution (without detracting from the term execution, which has its own merit).
    Facilitating experimentation
    The exciting part of our work at Peninsula is the continuous learning we experience. Throughout the pilot testing process we learned a lot with entrepreneurs and their processes of creating a company through agile and lean startup methodologies, where the word experiment is used more, which also releases tensions and expectations.
    We have learned a lot working with large corporations, beasts in terms of deployment, execution and tuning, who sometimes need additional help to carry out projects with high doses of uncertainty and that require reactivity, agility and perhaps a different point of view from the well-ingrained corporate strategy.
    Our goal is to create clarity out of this uncertainty through pilots and ensure corporate relationships thrive. When we refer to bringing together corporations and startups, beyond technicalities, we introduce that dose of humility necessary for a big company to accept working with a small one, and for the small not to feel intimidated by the big.

  • Non-stop innovation

    The success of innovation in organizations lies in its constant application. This success is even more powerful if innovation ceases to depend on a single unit in the company and becomes part of the company s daily business. Then, the only thing the unit has to do is to drive the development of constant innovation.

    According to the Survey of Innovation in Companies of the Spanish National Institute of Statistics, expenditure on innovative activities was 17.074 million euros in 2020.

    The 12.6% of Spanish companies innovated in product, and the 19.9% innovated in their business processes. The success of innovation in organizations lies in its constant application.

    Even with these numbers, it is important to consider that before developing an innovation project there is an exploratory area that is decisive.The start of innovation

    Where does it all start?

    In the detection of a need of a group of users. That need may be a latent but unexplored trend; it can also be a specific problem in a specific area linked to the company’s offer.

    From this clue the whole process is activated, ready to end up in an action plan and be further developed into an innovation project.Innovational clues are collected from observation, passive or active. Passive observation is defined as that which is integrated. If you run through the exercise of observing what you do from the moment you get up until you leave the door of your house, you will surely be able to identify unsolved problems: Save more water than we use? Eat things that are more suitable for our body? How to optimize the exercise we do passively? Optimize the time of arrival at the destination based on real time mobility information?

    If this exercise is incorporated throughout the organization, the passive collection of problems and trends can generate a huge database of potential innovations waiting to be developed. The active collection of clues is more typical of those organizations that regularly need to activate the exploratory processes of innovation. In this way sessions are organized to detect and prioritize needs and trends to be solved for certain groups of users.

    Both passive and active collection require an internal exercise of constant discipline in the productive processes.Analyse opportunities wellOnce the opportunities and trends that need to be addressed have been prioritized, it is time to delve a little deeper into them. It is important to mature them to know how the market is facing that trend, what technologies exist that can provide solutions, or how the investments in that area are faring. In this way, we have a very credible picture to know if there is movement or not regarding that particular problem.

    At Peninsula we have developed a service for Market Insights which generates very detailed reports with all this information. Market Insights is constantly in a process of collecting trends that will end up in innovation projects while also providing a constant drip on what is happening around the organization in order to, at the right time, enter that area in innovation.

    At this point someone could claim that the end user has not yet been seen during the investigation. And they would be right. It can even be said that this is not useful if what we are talking about is innovation, something that always needs the user at the centre.

    But in reality we are at a very early stage of exploration. Both in the passive and active collection of problems or trends, the protagonists in this process know the user. When we dive deeper into the prioritized trend or problem, exploring the market and knowing who is already providing successful solutions shows that if the market is moving, it is because customers are buying.

    Open innovationThe process is now ready to leave the exploratory stage: you have the problem or the trend detected and prioritised and you have approached it in depth in order to have a picture of its reality in the market. Now is the time to open up to other points of view so that they can give their opinion on it. Pure, open innovation.Open innovation involves incorporating expert viewpoints from trend-related fields, or from other companies that have dealt with similar topics and are not competitors. Here it is possible to obtain extremely valuable insights. Knowing what others have done to solve similar problems but in different sectors can be an excellent source of inspiration.That ecosystem of external expertise should be a continuum in any organization. Moreover, as the inventor of the Open Innovation concept, Henry Chesbrough, points out, established companies must always grow and have enormous external resources to help generate clues that startups canst even dream of having available.

    In a Fraunhoffer Institute study on open innovation in large European corporations, with the participation of Henry Chesbrough, in 2012, 78% of corporations were practicing open innovation. 71% had increased management support for the practice. None had abandoned open innovation processes.

    Therefore, 10 years later, this practice has grown exponentially.From all of the above, the next step is to propose an action plan to address (or not) an innovation project based on solutions, testing and activation for its market launch. At Peninsula we call this the Innovation Sprint, running from the collection of trends or problems to the definition of an Action Plan. This Innovation Sprint adds value by maintaining an active innovation pipeline within the organization.

    Here you can learn about a case in which we have applied this process in depth: Open innovation applied to the future of retail.

  • GameBCN, building the future of video games

    The video game sector has been present at Peninsula’s everyday life for some years now, thanks to the activity of GameBCN, the video games incubator that this year has held a 6th edition marked by the global pandemic. Over the past half year, GameBCN’s team has worked closely with 5 selected teams from around the world to bring their independent video game design and distribution projects to life, and the effort and the results were reflected last 22nd of September during the program’s Demo Day.Celebrated with an online broadcast in YouTube and also with a small gathering of promoters in El Canòdrom, the official headquarters of the program, the Demo Day put an end to six months of funding, training, workshops, talks and mentoring designed to guide the participating indie studios in the development of their projects and advise them on business and marketing issues.GameBCNs formula has proven itself effective edition after edition, and the teams are very happy with the resultsA telematic and international Demo DayThe five studios from GameBCN 6 (DC1AB, Invincible Cat, Viral Studios, Mansion Games and GROUND), with members of different parts of the world, were able to show their progress and present the demos of their video games to the general public through a live streaming in YouTube.Besides, after the event some members of the teams celebrated a good-bye session to share some learnings about what had worked and the things that could be improved facing future editions of the program.This Demo Day is indeed a reflection of our commitment to innovation in the gaming sector and the hard work of the participants, who have received knowledge in programming, design, marketing and sales to create and promote their video games, as well as funding to keep moving forward in their path to success.Facing the future of the sectorParallel to the Demo Day streaming, a little event was held in the facilities of El Canòdrom, our consultancy’s old headquarters, closed to the public and respecting all the current health measures.This event had as guests some representatives of Generalitat de Catalunya’s Departament de Cultura, Regidoria de Turisme i Indústries Creatives and Institut de Cultura de Barcelona, as well as some sponsors (Socialpoint and Gameloft) and members of the academic community from UPC and ENTI.The goal of this meeting, besides of concluding and evaluating the sixth edition of the incubation, was to analyse the video game landscape and the next steps in the sector’s innovation to determine how to keep supporting this industry and its growth in our country, adopting a multidimensional approach that included all the stakeholders involved. Seventh edition on the way After six editions, 37 incubated teams and 2.5 million euros of funding raised by the teams, at Peninsula we are certain that GameBCN has a very promising future, that’s why we have already opened applications for the seventh edition of the program, to continue discovering talent in the video game area and turning Barcelona into a reference hub in the gaming field.On the other hand, GameBCN is also collaborating with the Institut Català de les Empreses Culturals (ICEC) to offer a new mentorship program aimed at companies whose activity is related to video games.This line of up to 12 hours of mentorship will provide customised advice in law, funding, strategy, marketing, production, publishing, distribution, monetisation or human resources for free to the participants, in a similar way to the work carried out during the incubation program, but with a more specific framework and a shorter duration (until the end of 2021).iGi: internationalising the sectornAs we say, GameBCN’s formula has proven itself effective edition after edition, and the independent developers teams are very happy with the results of the program. That’s why, some months ago we bet on international expansion through a Japanese version of the incubator.Together with the multinational Marvelous, GameBCN set out to launch a version of its program in Japan, called Indie Game Incubator (iGi), and after such a productive first edition, the Demo Day of which will be held next 26th of November, a second round of incubation is already confirmed, that will help to keep fostering innovation and creativity in the video game industry on a global scale.At Peninsula we are very grateful to have such direct contact with the entrepreneurial ecosystem and to be up-to-date with gaming, a growing sector, which allows us to collaborate in the development of innovative business initiatives and to keep going and learning along the way.

  • Corporate innovation culture: Innovate and grow

    Today, having extensive experience in the sector or market niche in which we are located is no longer enough. It is true that having business experience can help solve many problems, but a lack of innovation can lead to many others.Innovation is imperative in order to avoid being eaten by your competitors. It is very common, especially in entrepreneurs with traditional roots in the industrial era and with a defensive mentality, to have difficulty establishing a strong culture of innovation. This is where it becomes clear that either the company will innovate or it will not be able to compete in the market. Faced with this situation, entrepreneurs tend to mobilize instinctive initiatives such as resorting to open innovation and intrapreneurship programs.RECOGNISE YOURSELFTo develop a new culture of corporate innovation in your company, the first thing to do is to raise the mirror and recognize who you are as a company. To make this task easier, analyze the profile of your employees, all of whom came to you for a reason. Its vital to understand that employees choose to develop their careers in large corporations for specific reasons.The main reason for corporate career development is professional success, and therefore in a company it will be measured by profit and rank. With this in mind you can already see one key to your company’s ideal culture, and a reference point from which to continue innovating.It must be taken into account that cultural change is not an easy task, it requires constant training in addition to a series of basic but often overlooked qualities such as trust, good leadership, and above all patience and time. It is vital, in order to make cultural change, to know who you are as a company and set clear objectives about what you want to change. After that, discovering the initiatives that suit your corporate personality will come more naturally.THE FIRST FIVE STEPSThese factors represent visible, tangible and practical actions that create a very solid foundation and are vital, because once we have achieved them we are ready to move on to our specific corporate initiatives. The first person who should promote innovation is the CEO. It is critical to make sure that he/she is the person who promotes the innovation agenda to his/her employees. Change must be made publicly so that not only the management team, but the whole company, is part of the change. The CEO must also understand and establish that failures are renamed as learning experiences to begin to establish a culture of permission. The second point is to make a roadmap for the whole team to understand the objectives and key areas of the company’s internal strategy. This will help and motivate employees to take ownership of their strategy, as well as recognizing the return of establishing a culture of innovation. Decide where to spend the company’s money and time regarding closed innovation and open innovation. Remember that closed innovation represents internal R&D and entrepreneurship. On the other hand, open innovation represents alliances, mergers, acquisitions and corporate venture capital. Once you have decided which of the two you want to focus on, allocate resources and funds accordingly. Establish roadmap-specific innovation metrics. Create ways to quantify the company’s goals that are more motivating and rewarding for your employees. For example, instead of measuring the number of new products or services delivered to the market, measure the percentage increase in revenue from new products and services compared to existing ones. Adopt a progressive crawl, walk, run approach. Most companies dont lack ideas but they do lack resources. A shortage of resources often leads to losing sight of the goal, and it is at that moment that responsibility and ownership for the innovation project are lost. Therefore, it is essential to limit the number of initiatives in focus at any one time and add new initiatives as you achieve the previous ones.This way the company will always keep a short term goal and it will feel much more rewarding since you will continuously see yourself meeting them.ANOTHER POINT OF VIEWUndertaking this type of change is a complicated task, and many companies that want to develop a culture of corporate innovation help themselves by drawing ideas from outside perspectives. Since it is very difficult to be objective, discover mistakes and make changes in something you live with every day, we recommend that you seek help from external corporations to drive changes in your company culture. This will provide you with an objective, external view of what your business really needs, as well as implementing endless innovative ideas that will undoubtedly make you grow.