Does the green entrepreneurship ecosystem have a future in Spain?
A magazine asked me some questions about the present and future of #innovation and #sustainability, passing through #Bcorp, Impact Hub Madrid and what contributes to making an entrepreneurial ecosystem more innovative.
I share my ideas with the hope it can awaken and encourage your own ideas to co-create better futures.
QUESTION: From your experience as a member of an international reference entity in certification of companies with positive impact (the B Corp movement in Europe), how do you assess the entrepreneurship ecosystem in Spain in relation to that positive impact?
A decade ago we could talk about isolated local and national phenomena. Now much of what happens in a nation is part of a much broader global wave. The entrepreneurship ecosystem in Spain is following the same global pattern: an exponential increase in the visibility and success of companies created with a new business model, created with the idea of being the best companies for the world. Companies at the service of real social, environmental and human needs.
QUESTION: What is essential for a company or entrepreneurial initiative to have a positive impact?
I offer three priorities:
1. The purpose, its raison d’être. This guides not only the vision of the CEO but also the purposes that unite your staff, and now also the purposes of your customers, suppliers, the community that surrounds the company.
2. Behaviors, the coherent way of doing things
3. The measurement, the decision of what is measured and held as a parameter of success in the company will be what guides its more or less positive impact. If we only measure the easiest indicator, the profits, we can be sure that this will be the main axis and focus of the company.
What does your company measure?
QUESTION: What is the process for a company to achieve positive impact certification?
Becoming a B Corp is a challenge that few companies achieve and more than a certification it is a way to describe yourself. A growing number of companies are not satisfied with being defined as a traditional company. They are also not considering themselves an NGO. So being able to proudly say “we are a B Corp” is what allows a company to define itself.
But to achieve Ser B, a strict evaluation and audit of the impact business model is needed in five areas: workers, governance, environment, customers and suppliers.
It is also mandatory to change the company’s statutes to define very clearly its impact approach to people and the environment.
Finally, you are asked to sign and adhere to the “letter of interdependence”.
Interdependence is the value that unites all B Corps. It demonstrates their awareness of the consequences of their actions on others and the need for a new systemic and not isolated vision between the company and everything that surrounds it.
QUESTION: What is the weight of sustainability within positive impact?
I understand sustainability in its broadest form, which of course includes the environmental part but also the human part of the impact on people, without forgetting the economic part. A good economic result, allows the company to stay alive and to continue creating the positive impact that this new generation of business models aims for. So it’s essential and not secondary. But the creation of financial benefits has to be the consequence of good work on the first two axes of sustainability and not the primary end.
Taking care of people’s sustainability, their mental and physical well-being, means creating the best conditions for people to thrive. Creating the best climate, authentic trust between your people in all their interactions, create the best opportunities for the full development of the infinite capacities present in all human beings.
Taking care of people, their values and a unity of intentions towards higher purposes which they feel is worth working and working hard to achieve, carries with it the direct consequences of an approach of environmental sustainability.
This is the true circularity of the company that I have already observed in so many entities. Starting from focusing on their people, they manage to implement the most virtuous business models.
QUESTION: In this context, to what extent is innovation important for a business project to succeed?
On a negative side, it could be said that innovating is essential to avoid being left behind. But if we look at the other, much better, side of the medal: innovating should be a natural way of being, a mindset, always looking for better ways to achieve sustainable results. We would never have to tire of innovating, taking advantage of all the creativity and then applying effective execution processes to it so that innovation is not only thought about, but also successfully implemented.
QUESTION: How can we combine sustainability and innovation in an entrepreneurial project?
This combination seems to me the most natural thing that should be born from each mind that is keen and eager to contribute more to the society around it.
It is also true that each person and each company has different levels of innovation. For this reason, intelligent leadership is able not to limit innovation to what is present inside the company itself but to involve all affected stakeholders in co-creating the best solutions.
Create your community, your tribe that shares your sustainable aspirations, that wants to be part of the solution you intend to implement. Having the ability or developing the ability to engage, to co-create solutions with the best people inside and outside the company is a fundamental ingredient in this new era of co-creation that we are entering.
QUESTION: You know the international ecosystem of entrepreneurship with impact. What would be the peculiarities of the Spanish market, from your experience as co-founder of the Impact Hub Madrid?
Impact Hub Madrid is a clear example of this global wave I was talking about earlier. A trend that is born from so many regions and is part of a broader movement that also encompasses Madrid and Spain.
We started in 2007 with a groundbreaking idea and that few in Spain bought: “here in Spain co-working will never work, Spaniards love their office and will never share it with other entrepreneurs,” they told us then. And today with more than 30,000 co-working spaces in Spain we can see how wrong they were to isolate a “Spanish” way of understanding the workplace from a natural and global human trend.
From day one, we created a space that could “inspire, connect and promote the social innovator.”
If there is one element that has always been at the center of our mentality and of all the spaces (there are already five in Madrid alone) of the Impact Hub Madrid, it is the collaborative spirit. From the shape of the tables, the spaces, the dynamics. Everything has fed this collaborative spirit that 15+ years later has spread through so many spaces and organizations.
QUESTION: What contributes to making an entrepreneurial ecosystem more innovative?
I offer three elements:
1. Control is very difficult to give up, but the dissemination of control, autonomy to the more levels and people is fundamental to unleash entrepreneurial innovation.
2. Trust, of a culture that rewards risk, that does not judge but learns from the inevitable mistakes that are made when the limits of what is possible are pushed.
3. Excellent, agile and transparent execution processes so that all the creativity that can be fostered does not become the predominant cynicism that occurs when you propose a lot but do not have the ability to implement anything.
QUESTION: How do you see the future of the entrepreneurial ecosystem, and in particular, of green entrepreneurship?
There are pressures and illusions that push in the same way and harder every day, making us step on the accelerator of green entrepreneurship.
The urgency of changes of course, of necessary rapid green transitions. Increasingly strict and sharper laws that will fine those who are left behind and reward those who get a green approach and solutions. The transition of the financial world that will move the axis of its investments only in the direction of sustainable solutions. These are just some of the pressures that are creating the “perfect sustainable storm” and that will accelerate the green future.
But there are also sincere genuine desires to lead the change we need. Of course the new generations with more passion, but all generations equally want to be the first, the leaders, the best of this new wave of green entrepreneurship.
Every day more and more companies are being created or moving their focus towards being the best companies FOR the world. It is an extremely attractive trend for talent, motivation, society and the planet.
