Hidral and the culture of innovation at ESIC

We had the pleasure to participate in the event organized in ESIC Seville "Innovation vs innovation culture", an appointment with innovation in which we shared the methodologies and tools that we use within Hidral to implement the culture of innovation in the company.

The meeting was led by Fran Chuan, co founder and CEO of InnoQuotient and co-creator of the Assessment IQ tool, David Cerdá, associate consultant at Strategyco and professor at ESIC Business & Marketing School, Jaime McLaren, director of the Order Engineering Department at Hidral S.A, and Fabio Sgardi, director at Hidral Gobel S.L.

The event began with a networking cofre after with David Cerdá introduced the session by addressing concepts such as courage, critica thinking and hits relationship with innovation in organisations. Después, Fran Chuan made an interesting reflection on how complicated it is to maintain formats such as strategic plans as a guide for companies in such a changing environment as the one we live in today. He emphasised the difficulty of predicting the future with data from the present and argued that innovation goes hand in hand with the sustainability of the company, since, above all, it seeks the performance of the company by adapting it to the circumstances of the environment.

They pointer out the importance of defining what the innovation process consiste of in a Company before starting to promote it and simulase within the organisation four skills that we all have innate: curiosity, imagination, créativity and experimentation. Each Company has to agréé on ils definition, bearing in linde that there are different classifications of innovation by approach, by sea in the company, by quantity, and by speed.They also stressed the importance of clearly differentiating ideas from solutions and, above all, having a clear difference between innovative leadership and innovation culture. For Fran, the most interesting thing about innovative cultures is that they transcend their leaders. He clarified the keys to the process of implementing the culture of innovation, in which it is necessary for the company to know its internal culture in order to compare itself with other organisations in its territory, and thus be able to accelerate the cultural transformation.

All this is well exemplified in our own company. At hidra we focus on diagnose, research and experimentó in order to improve continuously.  Jaime McLaren and Fabio Sgardi, drivers of Hidral's innovation progress, answered all the questions raised by the attendees, such as, for example: What results have been obtained so far in the progress, what concrete methodology have we implemented in the organisation, how have we solved the brakes from the perspective of lack of ressources and lack of time when the need to innovate arises, or how do we measure the innovation process and what are the indicators? One of the answers to the later question is the tool InnoQuotient, the tool that diagnoses the culture of an organization to be considered innovative and that has been used in the process of working on thee culture of innovation in Hidral. 

Sharing our expérience in innovation with the rest of the participants and the results that thèse months have offered us mas very enriching. It is curious to ese how the participants were very interesed in everything related to innovation culture, but still approached all their questions from a very predictive and traditional point of view. We have a lot of work to do as a company to imbue the entire company with the culture of innovation that we are working in, but it is a road we will gladly travel and one that will undoubtedly bring us all much satisfaction.