Bernardo Kanahuati and the upcoming biorevolution

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The Chair for Smart Industry (Comillas ICAI), had Bernardo Kanahuati, CEO of Bayer in Spain and Portugal and Country Division Head for the Pharma Division in Spain, as a guest in its cycle “Breakfast with CEO”.
The rector of the university, Enrique Sanz, SJ, was in charge of opening the act. Bernardo Villazán, Head of the Chair for Smart Industry, accompanied the rector and introduced him to the attendees. Among the people attending were several patrons of the chair.
Bernardo Kanahuati shared the importance of collaborative and open innovation with the guests. He also explained why it’s still key to always have innovation as a business goal in order to develop solutions to society’s challenges, which are getting more consistent, requiring a real commitment to investment in research. In an increasingly technological and digitized world, the leaders of organizations must do so under criteria that improve equity and accessibility, so as not to generate inequalities between different countries or regions.

Bayer puts faith on being a key agent in the “biorevolution”, being pioneers and taking an active part in the food and health sectors, which will be the industries with the greatest impact in the coming years. They also explained that Spain is well positioned in both areas, with a 9th place in biotechnology production, a 4th place exporting European agri-food products and the 7th in the world. The disruptive innovation projects Bayer has carried out have allowed them to provide solutions to: biomolecules, biosystems, biomachines and biocomputing.

Bernardo Kanahuati told the attendees about the trends that are being seen in the industry, linked to technological innovation and patient empowerment. This empowerment is the result of the big change in access to information, as well as in the technological devices we have, which allow us to monitor multiple aspects of our health. Nowadays, any person is a machine capable of generating medical data thanks to mobile devices.

As a result of all this technological progress, in the coming years, we will be able to see a turning point in these sectors, in which the focus will no longer be “to heal” but “to prevent”. Precision medicine and science are the ones that will improve society without a doubt. The presentation was followed by an interesting colloquium with the audience, which focused on the impact of this biorevolution, how to make this progress accessible and available to everyone who needs it, what competencies and skills professionals will need to have so that these projects are successful, as well as what cross-sector open innovation solutions will be needed.