Disruptive innovation takes an established business model and turns it on its head. It’s hard to find that kind of innovation within large companies: the best place to identify those processes is “on the outside”, far away from corporate buildings and under the radar.
For us, innovation is not only a part of the strategic projects we develop in-house, it’s also part of the developments occurring elsewhere in the world. For that reason, our company is firmly committed to innovation that occurs outside of Ferrovial.
Accordingly, our approach to open innovation pursues continuous dialogue with start-ups and entrepreneurs, viewed as an opportunity to identify talent and collaborate on the development of new solutions. This also enables Ferrovial to develop competitive advantages based on those alliances.
One of the initiatives that facilitates these processes is the Pasion>ie programme, organised by Accenture and IE Business School. This initiative has various objectives, one of which we find particularly interesting: developing the “city of the future”, an area in which our Services unit has considerable experience, especially in smart city development.
The exploration of innovation through programmes such as Pasion>ie goes hand in hand with the innovation process in which a company seeking to establish competitive advantages vis-à-vis other players in the industry must be fully immersed. At Pasion>ie, first and foremost we are judges, but we are also mentors. We don’t want to limit ourselves to simply evaluating projects, as we are especially interested in learning to incorporate them into our infrastructure.
The exploration of innovation and projects helps us identify potential technologies and business models which can be implemented in Ferrovial as part of our focus on offering the company’s businesses every tool possible to boost competitiveness.
A practical example of our experience at previous editions of Pasion>ie was the analysis of the technical characteristics of public street lighting we did with a start-up named Mirubee, which complemented our initiatives focused on innovation in energy efficiency in buildings. More recently, at the third edition of Pasion>ie, we were once again pleasantly surprised by interesting, innovative proposals such as Improve Your City, an incident resolution platform which includes citizen participation in city management processes, and NBox, which uses an M2M communication network that allows for the remote management of infrastructure, such as street lighting.
These projects, like those before them, encourage us to maintain our firm focus on open innovation so as to continue to identify talent and establish alliances which help us accelerate Ferrovial’s vision of infrastructure and cities of the future.
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