Innovation farms: An unprecedented ecosystem to accelerate corporate innovation

IE University’s School of Human Sciences and Technology is pleased to announce the launch of its Innovation Farms. An ecosystem that bring together corporations, technology providers and superior business and tech talent to accelerate corporate innovation, each farm will focus on a particular area of technology or data science that is transforming business and where technology plays a significant role. The Customer Analytics Farm has just been launched and additional farms in Digital Law, Operations Analytics and Cybersecurity will follow soon.

“Corporate leaders are told, ‘innovate or disappear,’ notes Lee Newman, Dean of IE’s School of Human Sciences and Technology. “Yet, the power of the status quo can quash potential innovations in products, services and business processes before they are fully considered. To win in markets being transformed by technology and startups, senior managers need a neutral ecosystem outside their corporate walls, where they can quickly experiment and test their ideas.”

The Customer Analytics Farm held its first workshop in March 2017. At this workshop, senior managers, technology partners and a network of business and tech experts came together to discuss a 360 degree customer profile. Twenty-two renowned brands took part, including Banco Popular, BBVA, Calidad Pascual, Carrefour, CEPSA, CINESA, FNAC, Gas Natural Fenosa, Grupo VIPS, IKEA, Las Rozas Village, LG, Mastercard, Meliá, Mutua Madrileña‎, Orange, Publiespaña, Repsol, Santalucía, Santander, Toyota and Vodafone.

These corporations will have access to companies that specialize in relevant technology, such as Adobe, Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, SalesForce and SAS, among others.

The Innovation Farm workshops offer an unprecedented opportunity for senior business and technology executives of renowned international brands to learn from other companies who are implementing innovation projects, to interact with industry’s top technology providers and to discuss opportunities for collaborative early innovation labs. For an annual fee, corporate member companies have access to numerous benefits, including four yearly workshops around specific and relevant topics, an annual conference that highlights key findings and access to curated materials (reports, white papers, POV documents, etc.).

“Innovation Farms are eye-opening because they offer high-level executives across various industries a chance to discuss shared challenges,” explains Norman Kurtis, Vice Dean of Behavior and Human Development at IE School of Human Sciences and Technology. “Innovation Farm workshops are organized around key challenges that are common to all companies, and our objective is to help member companies understand the key pain points, possible roadmaps to innovation and the appropriate technologies available. As a result, ideas can then be developed into real early innovation proof of concept projects in an IE Innovation Lab.”

Designed to accelerate corporate innovation, Innovation Labs are specific projects commissioned by companies and run within the neutral ecosystem offered by IE University’s School of Human Sciences and Technology. With the goal of accelerating early-stage innovation projects by giving them the appropriate scope, project team, technology solution and management, IE Innovation Labs provide companies with a proof of concept that can be used for future development and roll-out.

Each project’s scope and complexity is determined by the participating member company and typically last three to four months. Unlike other institutional labs, the IE Innovation Lab focuses on tangible deliverables, which could include algorithms, bots, apps, digital business models, automation processes or analytics tolos.

“The scope for deliverables is limited only by imagination,” says Newman. “They could range from a predictive algorithm to predict product returns for a retailer, to an automated bot used by human resources departments to prevent sexual harassment lawsuits by notifying employees of potentially emotional language in an email before they hit send.”

Each innovation lab is managed by a team that includes a full-time project leader (from the IE network), a full-time project team of two to three people, and a team of experts (as required). The team works with technology partners who provide hardware, cloud services, analytics software and support. All team members are remunerated at competitive rates in order to guarantee the participation of top talent.

For further information on the IE Innovation Farms this site.

About the iFARM management team 

The IE Innovation Farm management team is comprised of Lee Newman, Dean of IE School of Human Sciences and Technology; Norman Kurtis, Vice Dean of Behavior and Human Development, and Director of Corporate Relations at IE School of Human Sciences and Technology; Borja Gonzalez del Regueral, Vice Dean of Technology and Data Sciences at IE School of Human Sciences and Technology; and Javier de Cendra, Dean of IE Law School.

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