Catalonia, a leading region for Exponential Organisations

Salim Ismail, OpenExO Chairman and Founding Executive Director of the Singularity University, was the keynote speaker at Catalonia’s Exponential Day celebrated in Barcelona, where 400 companies learned how to become an exponential organisation and how to disrupt their business models.

According to Ismail, Catalonia will become a leading region for exponential organisations, as global companies can benefit from building incubators or edge organisations in the area to implement real, disruptive innovation.  

For Ismail, exponential organisations are those that tap into technologies that are accelerating in perfomance exponentially. For global multinationals, Ismail argues that real disruption can only happen at the edges of the system, because the company’s core has a too powerful immune system to allow real change to succeed.  

From Barcelona, he argues, “mutinationals can build an edge organisation that becomes the future”. Key elements that favour that are “Catalonia’s appreciation for creativity, design and passion, as well as its central location and talent attraction”, he says.

At the end, Salim Ismail points out, the edges may become the new centres: “The option for big companies is to build an incubator or startup ecosystem here in Barcelona which can then, over time, become massive and bigger than the mothership”.