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Good evening.
When they offered us the chance to take part in PeKa Kucha
the first idea which occurred to us was to try and tell you about our latest Project, NeuronUP,
but when I started to write I immediately saw that the audience which was going to come didn't really want to know what NeuronUP was
so I tried to think of a topic which would be of value both to the target public and the Riojan Foundation for Innovation.
We are trustees and the subject I have come up with is innovation,
but not just empty words, but rather to try and express what we are experiencing with the NeuronUp project and innovation.
What we are living and experiencing and what we want to live with NeuronUp.
The basis of the whole company is Psico360.
Two psychologists, mother and son.
The clinical psychology part is looked after by Concha Santo Tomás and I (Iñigo) am the one responsible for HR.
But it all started as plain simple self employment
until one day in a talk I attended somebody explained the difference
between self employment and a business
I liked what I heard so I decided to steer the business
not towards self employment but rather towards a business
And that is where growth appears.
We went from one psychologist in the clinical area to one,
two, three, four and currently five psychologists working in clinical psychology,
looking for specialisation in each of its areas.
In the human resources sphere we began with just one person (me)
and increased to four, though now there are three.
This is the map of La Rioja, which is a pain because these are our clients.
Sadly we are regionalists and in many cases localists.
With the business we now have it is hard for us to move out from here.
When somebody arrived at the office (as a clinic) said: "Either we generate more pathology in
the surrounding area or we don't make the business grow, and that wasn't the idea".
When I visit companies they ask for people in our area of human resources
because they are growing, via R&D or via innovation.
So then I go back to the company and I say
"Damn it, we have to do the same, we can grow"
I go to the human resources part and they come up with ideas for improvement.
But the difficult thing is to create a package and sell it.
In the clinical sphere I ask them the same:
"Why don't we generate a new project?"
And they think of many things, particularly those involving assessment and clinical diagnosis.
But for me that is an oversubscribed field where people compete on price
and I couldn't see where the profit was going to come from.
Julián (Durán García), our neuropsychologist, specialised in brain damage, said to us:
"I have an idea, and you would solve a problem for me."
THE PROBLEM IS TIME.
He says sometimes it takes him an hour to produce contents to rehabilitate a patient for one hour.
THAT IS NOT VIABLE.
And this is a problem which, to a greater or lesser extent, he tells me that occupational therapists,
rehabilitation doctors and other neuropsychologists all have.
So WE CAN SOLVE A PROBLEM.
WE HAVE AN IDEA: To solve a problem for neuropsychologists, occupational therapists, rehabilitation doctors.
We like it, because we feel it is an idea which can be packaged,
can be built to scale, so we decided to develop the idea.
We can see what there is at national and international level.
We explore our market, and we come up with lots of ideas.
We put all these ideas on the table, spoke with
various occupational therapists and neuropsychologists and we asked them:
What is your (therapeutic) dream? How can we help you?
We collected up all the responses, wrote up a project and presented it to
the Economic Development Agency of La Rioja who gave it the go-ahead as an R&D+I project.
Remember we are psychologists. A very mature market, very traditional,
(in Spain) little or not at all technological.
Yet in spite of this, we have been able to present and R&D+I project to the Government of La Rioja and generate NeuronUp
It is a platform which will very soon be available in which there are thousands of technically advanced content items
for psychologists, neuropsychologists, occupational therapists and its purpose is to facilitate their work
with brain-damaged patients, due to dementias, TCE (and other causes).
But this has meant a change for us: from just being good with PowerPoint
we have moved up to a project in the clouds, for which WAYRA has considered our project as among the most technological
out of 580, to which we program things with Kinect, and for Telefónica, in their e-Health activity,
to visit our facilities last week to evaluate our project with a view to incorporating it.
We have changed our vision.
Before we were regionalists and localists. Now we have a global vision.
For us La Rioja must represent 0.01% of our sales. The point of view has totally changed.
The way of sharing out the cake is completely different.
Before we had the pathology of the population of La Rioja among the 60 consultations that we have.
No. Now we have the brain damage of the whole world divided into 10-15 software packages which exist in the world market.
But we have some items of added value which some of them will take a while to achieve.
Who are our touchers? These. Suddenly Apple bring out their iPad
and we decide to transfer everything to touch screens so they will work on tablets.
All of a sudden we are in a talk and Microsoft tell us that they are going to liberate the codes to liberate Kinect
and we will transform our material so that our applications can work on Kinect,
programming stuff on Kinect.
Something we have to reflect on here, even more so in times of crisis like these,
is that in this time we have created seven jobs, 3 in IT (2 computer technicians and an engineer),
3 neuropsychologists, a web designer and two interns -- I mustn't forget them.
In a time of crisis, seven new jobs.
Thinking is free. We have come into the NeuronUp project by wondering what we could do.
But now we are in the NeuronUp project we have learned to think on a bigger scale, think global,
and think technology, something we never did as clinical psychologists.
Technology is not the future, but rather the present, so that, think for God's sake.
As trustees of the Riojan Foundation for Innovation what I want to do is ask is it possible to innovate
if we, a very traditional, local-based company from a mature sector have innovated?
Anyone can innovate. For us it has meant thinking, growing, improving.
Finally, let me thank this team, the team from NeuronUp and from Psico360 at a dinner we had this summer.
Thank them for their hard work, because they are working like animals to get this project moving.
A big thank you to them and to you.