We arrive in Bilbao after just a short journey and have to say the countryside is beautiful. Rolling green hills and swiss-style houses that you wouldn’t expect to see in Spain however we are in Basque Country in the North where they get lots of rain.
After taking some time to explore the city we attend the cocktail reception at the Atrio del Edificio Ensanche on behalf of Bilbao Tourism and also listened to a speech from the Deputy Mayor where he thanked us all for coming and mentioned that Bilbao is at the forefront of innovation. ISPIM has been running events for years so it was so nice to see people who had kept in contact since their last meetings hugging and happy to see each other. What a friendly bunch of people!
This event is not your normal conference where only companies come to speak about their innovation strategy’s but it also welcomes Professors and University’s from around the world so we got to hear some very interesting perspectives from the world of academia.
Day 1 began with the Keynote Speakers Prof. Joe Tidd, Matt Kingdon and Jon Azua discussing lean innovation and co-creative innovative value then later after lunch many parallel sessions which really gave covered everything from Open Innovation, Business Models to Measurement & Performance and training People in Innovation. So Day 1 was packed with information. One comment from Kaheel Mailk from the University of Manchester really summed up how we think about innovation, “trust is a key component”. So true!
Later we were off to the Guggenheim Musuem for a private viewing of the collections and then a Gala dinner in the actual museum’s Atrium, we felt very lucky so to be in such a terrific building. One of the collections Anish Kapoor was terrific with wonderful sculptures and colours. (Although not being an art buff myself I’m not sure if you could call them sculptures!) Have a look at the website and let me know your thoughts on the Anish Kapoor collection. http://www.guggenheim-bilbao.es/index.php?idioma=es
After a good nights sleep we are back at the event where all day we have sessions running. The parallel sessions that we enjoyed a lot were Open Innovation & Collaboration and Customers. We heard from Christina Oberg in the afternoon who talked about customer roles in innovations. Christina said that innovation must be customer driven and by doing this they get free knowledge on how to improve their products. This is certainly something we have embedded in our process otherwise you never meet the needs of your customers. One such other comment was made by Beatriz Lara from BBVA, Beatriz said “customers rule” get over it!
So after another whirlwind day we are again taken out to a fabulous place for dinner. A Basque evening at the Azurmendi Restaurant and a tour round the Txakoli Wine Cellar. We were greeted at the door with glasses of Txakoli (white wine famous to that region) given a quick tour and then whisked upstairs to enjoy a lovely meal and live band. Once the drink started flowing everyone was on the dance floor for many hours and I’m sure a lot of people did not want the evening to end. We didn’t….
We would like to thank the Iain Bitran, Stephen Koen and the rest of the Board of ISPIM for such a wonderful event. They really did find a great balance between attending a conference and having fun. We loved all the interesting places in Bilbao we got to visit (we took around 200 photos!) so have a look on Inogate Facebook.
