Cantabria commits to innovation and the knowledge economy 

Francisco Martin, a civil engineer born in Santander, talks to Atalayar about the challenges of the pandemic for innovation and science and Cantabria's commitment to local talent and production. 

We wanted to look at the role of Cantabria in overcoming this crisis, with one of the lessons learned from this pandemic: should we recover industrialisation in Spain and Cantabria, but above all in Europe, and not depend so much on China? 

Speaking from my own experience, after studying civil engineering in Santander and doing my doctorate with the University and the IH, or the germ of what was called the GIO, in 2003, as fate would have it, I ended up in the Government with the opportunity offered to me at that time to support a change in the region's economic culture that was more knowledge-based. It is true that Cantabria's industrial muscle is essential and fundamental. The regions with the highest percentage of industrial GDP are the ones that have best withstood the two crises, the 2008 crisis and this pandemic. 

But it is also true that either there is a change in the economic model towards innovation and knowledge or we are going to have a bad time. Nowadays, it doesn't matter where things are manufactured, the most important thing is that things arrive on time and at the right price. What is important is that what is manufactured in Cantabria, for example, can reach any point in the world through digital showcases that project our products and deliver them to the customer's home within a reasonable period of time and at a convenient price. For this, logistics is fundamental.  

For me, the keys are, first, to be able to manufacture things that are competitive. For that we need the knowledge economy. Secondly, to be able to make what we are producing known, which is why I am very interested in Atalayar, for example, making known what is happening in the IH because it is a global business. The IH does not manufacture for Cantabria or for Spain, the IH is manufacturing knowledge for the world as managers of companies in the region.  Thirdly, that what we produce can be delivered at the lowest possible cost and in the shortest possible time to the customer's point of sale. That is the broad outline of our strategy.  

But in no case should we do without or renounce manufacturing, far from it, on the contrary. In Cantabria we live from this, we have a twenty-something percent industrial GDP, which is much higher than the national average of 16%. Cantabria is a fundamentally industrial region, that is what we are.  

This does not prevent us from being a region that can focus well on tourism, we are well balanced, 23% industry, 12% tourism, I think it is a fairly good balance. Considering what is happening now that tourism is practically disappearing, we still have the powerful muscle of industry. 

However, the knowledge economy and production capacity face a number of difficulties. The IH is a case in point. A distinguishing feature of the IH is that until a year ago it did not receive a single euro in baseline funding. In other words, the IH's budget was not reflected in any administration's budget. Neither the Government of Cantabria nor the State Government had a budget line to finance the HI. It was the only national research centre in which this was the case, as it was not part of the CSIC or any other public research centre. We began to work to obtain this basal funding, that is, funding that allows us, although we have to dedicate a lot of effort to selling our science, to also have basal funds that allow us to maintain part of the staff by generating knowledge. Not travelling around the world selling science, but travelling around the world trying to attract talent and generate knowledge and generate publications. 

That is the other issue, the stabilisation of talent. You can't try to keep the most talented people here if you can't offer them a professional projection, that is, a professional career so that they can develop all their work within the IH. This is where the dysfunction between public and private organisations arises. Because again, you cannot know what your budget will be in many years' time, so you will not be able to offer a professional career that guarantees the maintenance of these jobs, in other words, we are gradually solving the problems of the HI, perhaps the next problem to be solved will be that of the professional career.  

Today we still have a very low average age. Logically, these people will gradually want to consolidate their jobs, salaries and positions. This is probably the next task of the IH. Along with a generational changeover. That is to say, those who have been pulling the cart today will need young people who will also collaborate with the current heads of the IH. As a government, I believe that the IH model was a success, as a state, as Spain, the IH was recognised as the best project financed with cohesion funds, in the history of cohesion funds in Spain.  

As I said before, perhaps the most relevant thing, the most remarkable thing about the IH is that we have been able to create a structure that is working today in 80 countries around the world, from the projection of a region with the electrical mass that Cantabria has. 

This requires specialisation; you cannot try to promote all the research groups with the same intensity. You have to focus on excellence. In the case of Cantabria, physics, health and, in this case, the IH, are basically the most academically relevant aspects from an objective point of view. Therefore, this is what we are committed to. There was a campus of international excellence that also allowed us to identify the environment, water and energy as key elements in the progression of the academic visibility of the University of Cantabria and this also helped us at the time. In any case, there are 140 people there who earn a living thanks to the talent and knowledge they generate.  

When you work in Oman with the coastal management system, when you work in Central America on disaster prevention systems. These are things that only very sophisticated, very specialised centres are capable of providing. It is a relatively small market, it is true, but it is also true that there are few suppliers of this technology in the world and in the end the figures come out.  

The IH is a source of regional pride and it also serves to illustrate the concept of the knowledge economy, because we often talk about the change of economic model with generalities: "you have to consolidate talent, sell knowledge, innovate constantly, the process of digitalisation...", but if you don't have a tangible example...  

And doesn't this also generate a certain imbalance in the sense that in order to be able to go out to the foreign market, demand often forces us to carry out tasks that are not core to the Institute, offering a more mercantile image? For example, I have read that in the United States the future of water is beginning to be listed on the stock market. 

The water issue was something that had to happen, which I don't think was a good thing, because water has to be a demanial asset, it is under Spanish law, but not in other countries. Water should be available to everyone, it should not be an element to be negotiated with, but it is a raw material. Just as today we have an economy based on oil, tomorrow it will be an economy based on water. Because it is going to be water that will allow countries' economies to scale up.  

And with regard to the commercial image, there is no choice, because in an institute in which you base yourself financially on what you can sell on the market, you have to innovate in what the market is demanding. We have the greatest expert at national level and one of the greatest at European level on climate change. Climate change is not explicitly about water, but water is the big one affected by climate change, for better and for worse. Water supply in areas of desertification is going to be dramatic, but over time the change in rainfall is going to make both freshwater and saltwater flooding increasingly common. This is not biology, it is water engineering, but at the moment there is an important demand in the market. Logically, this is also true for water quality. Everything that has to do with renewable energies that are carried out in water has also been a niche that has appeared in recent years with the whole issue of off-shore wind power generation, all the floating issues that support wind turbines, because the wind wave areas on land are practically occupied and there is also a certain rejection of installing more wind turbines, so the alternative is to go to the sea where the wind flow is much more laminar, where there are more hours of wind and where if they are far enough away, there is no visual impact. Everything that has to do with the systems that support it, with the evacuation through cables, the underwater substations... all of this is also being analysed. Wherever water is part of the physical process, the IH is active. From marine biology, river ecology, riverside forests, floods, flooding... Wherever water plays a role, the IH has a field of knowledge. 

World War III, apart from the fact that it is taking place via financial, cyber attacks, bugs and viruses. If there were to be a third, traditional, cannon-firing World War, it would be over water. That essential scarce commodity. 

Of course, what limits the growth of society? Two things: the availability of energy and the availability of food, if you have those two things as a society, you can grow. For both things, renewable energies, where hydropower plays a fundamental role, where the hydrogen economy is going to be fundamental, drinking water, if we want society to develop in a safe way, has to be guaranteed and then in crops, it is not so important the land, but the water. Many of them are hydroponic, which means they don't need to be planted in soil. The ability to feed your society will depend on the availability of water, the ability to guarantee healthiness will depend on the quality of the water, the ability to have, for example, a fish farm will depend on the river being of sufficient quality so that prices are not inflated.  

With regard to water reuse, it is a question of energy balance. In Cantabria it rains 1300 mm of water per year. What needs to be done is to treat the water to adequate discharge and discharge levels, because bringing that water to a quality that would allow it to be consumed again would require much more energy consumption than what it costs in Cantabria in particular to treat water. With these figures, what falls from the sky in Cantabria is 100 times more than what we could consume. There are other places where the rainfall does not guarantee it, so you have to bring it from somewhere else or you have to turn the water circuit upside down.

How can we raise social awareness in Cantabria and in Spain of the need for these research centres to protect what gives us life? 

Well, I believe that we politicians have a responsibility here. We have to raise awareness of what marks the future. Often in politics one is determined to make new things known every day to show that one is very good at doing things, and in this maelstrom of coffee for everyone, perhaps what is really a model for the future is a little hidden. In this case, centres such as the IH, the CTC, IDIVAL, the Valdecilla Virtual Hospital... are the ones that we need to be talking about intensively and repeatedly. We can say that there are 150 scientists at the IH who make a living from selling their knowledge, and that today the contributions made by IDIVAL to health technologies will allow us to reach an average age of one hundred years in the coming years. I believe that the future lies in adaptation, and adapting means learning to learn. It is not learning a trade, it is learning how to learn a trade. That is why there is a society that is moving forward and another that is gradually becoming stagnant. Those that have to do with classic business models are losing competitiveness and businesses are appearing that we didn't even think could exist five years ago. 

Does this awareness need to come from Cantabria, from Spain, or would it be better if we had a European initiative? 

Europe has been very good for us Spaniards, we are a country that often needs to see that others are doing well in order to change our course. In some aspects, the entry into force of European initiatives has benefited us enormously. When it was my turn to be Environment Minister, we had to process the integrated environmental authorisations, which were the environmental studies of the most polluting companies in the country, of which there were 62 in Cantabria. We did this because Europe obliged us to do so and it was really good for us, so that we could oblige companies in Cantabria to use the best available techniques. 

I think the fact that the recovery funds are for resilience and transformation is a very clear message. Not business as usual, because we are all dying. We are being overtaken by the Chinese on the right and the Americans on the left. How do I, as the European Union, get countries to get their act together? Well, by saying, look, if you want recovery funds, make them high beam. They are not to keep this dying company alive, they are for this company to manufacture completely different things in five years' time, to carry out a market study, to know what kind of people to recruit. That we as a country are capable of generating an agile and dynamic education system. What companies are demanding today in terms of digitalisation, the national training market is not producing it and it is possible that in 5 years' time it will be producing it, but in 5 years' time the market will be asking for something completely different. 

The digital world of tomorrow, we are going to see how it emerges from the bottom up, it is not going to be something that the States impose, that the universities take on..., this is a question of young people, who specialise. Let's be able to channel this through training processes in such a way that the society of tomorrow's young people will be young digital natives, not because they get it from YouTube, but because we teach them from school that they have to be imaginative, innovative, a little bit rebellious, not used to it. 

We were educated to be employees, the next generation is going to have to be self-employed, innovative, with the capacity to adapt, we have to be adaptable. This is what happens in nature, only those who adapt survive. A young person who today has created a web page, tomorrow can create a database and the day after that programme an automaton, in other words, learn to learn. 

Nowadays, fortunately, there are only coal mines where there is coal, but talent and knowledge can be generated anywhere.  

For that you basically need two things: a talent machine that is capable of training people, of enduring the years it takes for a researcher to go from being a recent graduate to being a productive researcher. And secondly, a good quality of life, it is very difficult to convince someone to generate science where the main concern is to make ends meet, where you have to go with bodyguards, or where the temperature does not drop below 50 degrees, quality of life is a fundamental element.  

Cantabria has both ingredients, a very scientifically productive university, it trains people wonderfully for employability, but above all, scientific generation is especially relevant. On the other hand, Cantabria is a region where the quality of life is very high, I would say one of the highest in the country, it is not overcrowded, you look out of the window and you don't see a single traffic jam, housing prices are still reasonable, temperatures are mild all year round and nothing ever happens. That is why we in the government are committed to strengthening initiatives such as the IH, the CTC or IDIVAL.  

It will probably be very difficult for large factories to set up in Europe in the future, for various reasons, for environmental control areas, labour costs, but it is true that the quality of life is going to allow the factories of talent and knowledge to be established in Europe. And I believe that in Cantabria we have all the ingredients for this to happen. The PCTCAN (Science and Technology Park of Cantabria) was created with this idea in mind, to create a scientific and technological environment, so that companies can come and set up here. It is not easy, even though science can be generated anywhere, Madrid and Barcelona are still the great sinks for the generation of companies and activity, which is why as the European Union we have to try to break this trend, otherwise we will end up in mega-cities, which are uncomfortable to live in and environmentally unsustainable. I trust in Europe to achieve this redistribution of the population throughout the territory.   

Has Cantabria been able to present any project for this recovery plan? Because the EU demanded projects and the central government created a plan. 

There were months of uncertainty, when we did not know where the mailbox was to send the European projects. Cantabria has presented 102 projects for this recovery plan, totalling 2.7 billion euros, the regional ministry of innovation has presented 8 projects, perhaps the most important of which is the logistics centre in La Pasiega. We want Cantabria to be a reference point for logistics in the north of Spain. 

And quality too. 

We are immersed in a buyer awareness campaign. If I buy from the shoe shop under my house, the shoemaker under my house will buy something that will benefit me in the future. If I buy from a wholesaler in Taiwan, that money is out of the system and will never come back.  

Buying close to home guarantees you a money circuit, and buying products from home guarantees you the maintenance of a certain GDP. If in the end we all buy only on price, we will be devaluing ourselves as a region, because we will only be looking for lower prices and therefore lower quality and always outside our region. We, as administrations, must not only try to make our products cheaper than others, I am not saying that we are protectionists, but we must at least be interested and responsible consumers.  

We have to try to make the client, the consumer, aware that small businesses have many advantages: the first is to generate society, what makes people go out into the street is the ability to enter establishments. The city centre is generated by small businesses, by commercial activity. When I lived in Great Britain, I remember that at 5 o'clock when the shops closed there was not a soul left on the street and here the same thing happens on Sunday afternoons, for example.  

Are you an optimist? What plans are you devising to recover your own and at the same time go abroad to be able to grow? 

The duties of a politician are similar to those of a ship's captain. If you see that the captain has no ideas, is afraid, or does not see a future in transit, he or she is lost.  

We have the obligation to create the conditions for people to be calm and have confidence in the future. What I have seen in June in Cantabria encourages me to think that as soon as the vaccine is distributed and we can lift the limitations that the pandemic has imposed on us today, the economy will recover vigorously, tourism will recover vigorously.  

There are sectors that have been hit quite hard, but I think it will be a V-shaped recovery. We have to take advantage of the situation generated by this pandemic. Commercial circuits have changed, we have rediscovered that security of supply lies in local supplies, we have rediscovered that the regions have to be a little more self-sufficient and as countries we must not depend on others in strategic matters. There is a whole world to dedicate to these recovery funds and to generate a new economy, the economy of survival, so that situations such as Spain having to look to China to buy masks or respirators are not repeated. We need a strategy of self-sufficiency in certain aspects, to return to considering domestic markets as fundamental suppliers and to believe once and for all that Spanish society must focus on the specialisation of knowledge.  

The key is to look for markets outside the conventional, which is why we need to encourage our companies to go out with energy, with the support and backing of a government, using the ICEX offices, all the resources to try to broaden the horizons of our market. 

And to attract investment. 

Today there is a liquidity binge. This country is enduring the crisis for two reasons: because of the ERTE tool, which I would ask the government to consider ending on 31 January, and because of the ICO tool, which has given us an injection of liquidity. There is a liquidity binge, what is lacking are profitable projects, I believe that what is lacking is the conception of a secure country. Throughout its recent history, Spain has shown that it has not been a very rigorous country for investors. Spain has to recover that image of a safe country in order to attract investment, because today I believe there is an abundance of liquidity for profitable projects with a future.  

The hydrogen economy is coming, and there will be more than enough funding for it because it is not an expensive technology. I don't think financing is going to be a problem, it's more about guarantees and assurances. 

And in terms of innovation and digitalisation, we have worked on fine rain and another fundamental issue, which is to bring broadband to all corners of Cantabria. Nowadays, in every corner of Cantabria you have broadband or fibre optics or a system to stay connected.