Drones and alt energy tech star at Spanish start-up fiesta Hardware tech such as drones and energy reclamation technology predominated at the Startup Ole conference in Salamanca, Spain last week. The two day event gathered 100 startups and more than 1,000 attendees to the historic University town in Western Spain. Similar events in the UK would be dominated by app developers or in …
They crowd any "disruptive" technology that became fashionable in the previous five years. Most of them fades into oblivion after burning their share of money. Still, they are a very valuable source of income for those who *sell* them what they need to burn money <G>.
I've seen it at the recent meetings in Rome with Cook and Zuckerberg. Mostly, reinventing the wheel, and copycatting ideas with a few changes. But still Apple and Facebook make money selling them "tools and services" - and getting some free PR.
The few that are actually truly innovative survive - but you don't see them easily...
The big difference between education in Spain and the UK, can't comment on USA, is that the Spanish education system teaches parrot fashion, it doesn't teach how to think for yourself and figure things out. My children went to UK universities and my wife constantly complained about how little time they spent in lectures considering we were forking out a fortune for something we could have got here for next to nothing. Even though she's a teacher she couldn't appreciate that they were expected to do things for themselves after a push in the right direction. To her learning is listening and repeating. Not exactly the right sort of environment for breeding entrepreneurs. Great training for passing the oposiciones and becoming a civil servant but sod all use when you need to innovate.
I have had the pleasure of attending a Spanish masters course. It consisted of the lecturer reading a book out to the lecture theatre (it probably doesn't really matter if the students are there or not), occasionally adding an observation or two but not straying very far at all from the text, and when there was a couple of minutes to go till the end ask if there were any questions. Obviously as time was up it was time to go.
I gave it up, I couldn't really hack it as I need visual representation and a bit of structure to understand things, if I wanted an audiobook I'd've bought one at a fraction of the price.
However students are good at getting together and putting together the knowledge that they each individually have to come up with something approximating what they're supposed to be taught by the lecturer, but I suppose they'd have to be.
That was about ten years ago though, maybe things have radically changed since then.
IE Madrid are currently touting their Masters in Business degree on the BBC. I can't think of anything worse - go to a Spanish university and have all the innovation, inspiration and initiative drilled out of you by someone droning on from a book.
I was taking the theory part of the driving test - I don't need it, I already have a full B licence but I wanted the bike licence so I could get a reasonably powered bike. I wanted to learn how to drive in Spain as opposed to driving like an English person driving in Spain. The rules are actually a little different. They don't let you on the road for practicals til you've passed your full test.
But bugger me the whole class consisted of a woman reading from slides with barely any digression from the content. And since we already had the content in books they'd given us it hardly seemed a worthwhile use of 2 hours on a weekday morning. What was worse was that the books were a potted summary of the 942 page highway code - written entirely in legalese with no illustrations. They were astounded when I showed them the UK highway code - the legal document is available online in the same format as the Spanish potted summary books - but it's the actual law.
In my experience the Spanish aren't taught to think for themselves so they don't. Most of the initiative and innovation comes from guiris (perjorative term for "immigrants") in one form or another - people who understand customer service, sales techniques and who are willing to have their business open when everyone else isn't at work and is available to pop in and spend...
What you have to remember is Spain itself is still practically a startup, 42 years ago it was a Fascist State with an aging Dictator at the helm.
The Spanish education system is a weird mixture of church school and hippy thinking, when my step daughter was studying for her Bachillerata (sort of a Highschool Diploma) she had so much to learn by rote she had no time to think, so by the time she left she had little interest in doing more of the same a uni'.
There are however a lot of very smart Spanish people and those that have a grasp of science and engineering tend to have a different and often innovative slant on things.
Events like Startup Ole are valuable in encouraging the Spanish to consider moving more and more into tech and engineering.
I have noticed that even people like telephone engineers and electricians seem to have been taught by rote, te hnical troubleshooting is a list of things to go through followed by shaking their head when nothing is revealed and then trying to go round the problem or come back another day.
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