Natalia Olson-Urtecho

Natalia Olson-Urtecho es cofundadora y directora de innovación y estrategia en The Disruptive Factory. Es una empresaria con más de 18 años de experiencia de trabajo en entidades internacionales, regionales y locales en América Latina, Europa Central y Asia. Cuenta con experiencia profesional en empresariado, blockchain, ciudades inteligentes, finanzas, contratación gubernamental, colaboración internacional, comercialización de tecnologías, planificación ambiental, construcción sostenible, zonificación, uso del suelo, transporte, participación pública y desarrollo de infraestructuras.

Tomar medidas contra la autorregulación del sector tecnológico parece un paso positivo, pero ¿podría esto conducir a problemas aún mayores a largo plazo?

El sector tecnológico nos ha brindado grandes oportunidades: podemos comunicarnos mejor, personas que antes no tenían información ahora sí tienen información. La sociedad se ha democratizado más. Las personas tenemos cada vez más opciones y contamos con más medios para comprender mejor la opinión de los demás. La tecnología proporciona una plataforma, no solo para unos pocos privilegiados, sino para millones de personas en todo el mundo.

¿Cómo pueden los gobiernos no impedir el crecimiento de las tecnologías emergentes con el exceso de regulación?

Cuando regulamos en exceso, estamos creando demasiadas barreras. La idea es trabajar con el sector privado para encontrar la mejor regulación para el crecimiento y la innovación. El papel del gobierno es actuar como un catalizador, motivar, ser tutores, descubrir cómo crear una comunidad en la que los ciudadanos puedan crecer y dar sus propios pasos. Es como cuando tienes un hijo y le dices todo el tiempo que no haga esto o aquello. El niño crecerá asustado. En los negocios ocurre lo mismo, si sigues poniendo obstáculos, el negocio nunca va a crecer. Por eso tenemos que encontrar el equilibrio cuando se trata de regulación.

En lo referente a la responsabilidad de nuestros datos, ¿podemos confiar en el sector privado antes de que se establezcan regulaciones por las administraciones públicas? ¿Están las administraciones bien preparadas para regular las tecnologías procedentes del sector privado?

La forma de regulación en Estados Unidos es actuar cuando surge un problema, sé que aquí en Europa también se actúa de forma parecida. «¡Dios mío, el agua está muy sucia y los lagos se están secando!» Solo cuando pasan las cosas es cuando nos damos cuenta de que debemos hacer algo al respecto, comenzamos a buscar productos bioquímicos o lo que haga falta. Pero ¿cómo podemos seguir trabajando en averiguar cómo resolver los problemas una vez que han surgido en lugar de detenerlos antes de comenzar? Pues porque de lo contrario viviríamos inmersos en una burbuja y así no es como se desarrolla la innovación. El gobierno tiene que consultar a los ciudadanos, a las empresas y a las personas que trabajan en las empresas, porque son ellos los que pagan los impuestos.

¿Están preparados los gobiernos para regular el sector privado?

El papel del gobierno es gestionar, tener un enfoque integral. No solo tiene que gestionar lo que hacen las empresas, también tiene que gestionar la infraestructura, la educación, las políticas internacionales, el clima… Todo. Pero no podemos esperar que el gobierno sea experto en todo. La competencia de los gobiernos es reunir a las partes interesadas para tomar mejores decisiones. El gobierno es una máquina, podría hacerlo por su propia cuenta, pero le llevaría unos 10 años. Debemos comenzar a crear un marco para que las generaciones futuras puedan afirmar: «gracias a nuestros investigadores, podemos avanzar en este sentido». El papel del gobierno es construir una infraestructura y una plataforma para el crecimiento futuro, para facilitar la próxima generación. Nuestro trabajo en política es asegurarnos de que el barco comience a moverse en la dirección correcta y no se hunda.

¿Deberían las empresas privadas pagarnos por nuestros datos dado que se están utilizando con fines comerciales? Nuevamente, ¿qué puede hacer la administración pública al respecto?

Nada es gratis en la vida. Tenemos que elegir. Queríamos toda esta información de forma gratuita, pero necesitábamos la infraestructura para usarla. De modo que realizamos un contrato. Queríamos saber lo que estaba sucediendo en el resto del mundo, pero sin pagar por ello. Lo que ocurre en la actualidad es que hemos creado una nueva industria, una infraestructura digital, donde se facilita toda esta comunicación. Ahora vivimos en una era industrial digital. Usted, como periodista, quiere que le paguen por su información, por escribir artículos increíbles, por grabar un vídeo… ¿Acaso no debería cobrar por ello? Lo bueno de estar en Europa es que el RGPD está trabajando para lograrlo. Esto es solo el comienzo.

Muchas empresas tecnológicas dicen: «averigüemos cómo regular mientras permitimos que las empresas crezcan». Si elaboramos buenas políticas y tenemos conversaciones abiertas y justas, podremos ayudar a la industria. Hace treinta años, tuvimos que reestructurar AT&T porque comenzamos a hablar de las empresas que tenían el monopolio. Hoy en día AT&T está de vuelta, pero trabaja de una forma diferente. No destruyó la industria, en realidad la ayudó. Ahora conocemos los parámetros y las fronteras. ¿Con qué debemos trabajar desde una perspectiva comercial?

Las grandes empresas tecnológicas deciden qué contenido ven las personas y cuándo. Esto les da el poder de moldear las decisiones de las personas, desde las compras online hasta sus votos. ¿Debería ser más transparente el uso de nuestros datos?

Nada es gratis en la vida. Tenemos que elegir. Queríamos toda esta información de forma gratuita, pero necesitábamos la infraestructura para usarla. De modo que realizamos un contrato. Queríamos saber lo que estaba sucediendo en el resto del mundo, pero sin pagar por ello. Lo que ocurre en la actualidad es que hemos creado una nueva industria, una infraestructura digital, donde se facilita toda esta comunicación. Ahora vivimos en una era industrial digital. Usted, como periodista, quiere que le paguen por su información, por escribir artículos increíbles, por grabar un vídeo… ¿Acaso no debería cobrar por ello? Lo bueno de estar en Europa es que el RGPD está trabajando para lograrlo. Esto es solo el comienzo.

Muchas empresas tecnológicas dicen: «averigüemos cómo regular mientras permitimos que las empresas crezcan». Si elaboramos buenas políticas y tenemos conversaciones abiertas y justas, podremos ayudar a la industria. Hace treinta años, tuvimos que reestructurar AT&T porque comenzamos a hablar de las empresas que tenían el monopolio. Hoy en día AT&T está de vuelta, pero trabaja de una forma diferente. No destruyó la industria, en realidad la ayudó. Ahora conocemos los parámetros y las fronteras. ¿Con qué debemos trabajar desde una perspectiva comercial?

Las grandes empresas tecnológicas deciden qué contenido ven las personas y cuándo. Esto les da el poder de moldear las decisiones de las personas, desde las compras online hasta sus votos. ¿Debería ser más transparente el uso de nuestros datos?

Tech companies weren’t being asked before. The top companies have been created in the last 20 years. They were created because they were trying to solve a problem, a social problem. None of them thought they were ever going to be this huge. Amazon, for example, started with books. Facebook started in a dorm room and was designed to connect friends. Apple started in a garage. If you look at these types of companies, they didn’t make any money for a long time, it was all free. Only when they launched on the stock market, did they start to think: how can we take back all the money we have borrowed?

The opaque part has to do with regulation. For example, in the US, congresspeople didn’t have to declare who they met and who they got payments from. So we passed legislation which ruled that you have to say who are you meeting with because your salary is paid by taxpayers. Now those conversations are public. This brought a lot of controversies. But citizens need to know where their hard-earned taxes are going. It has to benefit you and your family and the community you live in.

How can we control what’s going on in the private sector?

The problem is that there has to be a balance between control and freedom. Nothing in life is free. Even freedom is not free. A lot of people died for our freedom and made a lot of sacrifices, so the idea of having control all the time is not good. The government doesn’t have to have full control because it doesn’t work, you can’t monitor everything. In the private sector, if you are too controlling, you have no space for innovation, you have no space for crazy ideas. It’s not about doing everything by the book. The crazy ideas are the ones that we all try to strive for because they are different, they give us a new perspective in history. If you look at history, it would be quite boring if we didn’t have disruptive ideas.

 

What are the challenges and opportunities of building public-private technology partnerships?

Public-private technology partnerships are very important for several reasons. First, it helps the public sector understand the future. We give a lot of grants to companies. These are small businesses that start at the kitchen table, or in a garage or a dorm room. We have to be able to provide opportunities to make these companies grow. The government doesn’t know everything, so we ask: what’s the next innovative thing from a research perspective? And they say blockchain, Quantum computing, Artificial Intelligence. These are things that we have invested in during the last government. Scientists, researchers, and entrepreneurs come back from the future, and it’s the government’s job to invest in it.

Recently, one of Facebook’s co-founders, Chris Hughes pointed out that Mark Zuckerberg (with Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp) has “too much power” and that the US is not a country of monopolies…How can this be tackled and how does this monopoly affect the rest of the industry?

That is a very good statement from Chris because Facebook has grown a lot and acquired many companies and we need to pay attention to that. We still see these companies as smaller, because they are young companies and we tend to focus on older companies. The US is also a new country, we sometimes have to remember that. Congresses like the one that recently took place at DFS and that had more women than ever before are tackling that. From a legislator’s perspective, we have to ask: how are these companies becoming larger and creating a monopoly? Are they a catalyst? Are they helping other businesses? Because what is interesting is that these companies are investing in small businesses. They have huge venture capital and sometimes they acquire them. But we need to look at how they are doing things. That is the job of the government. We are having these conversations because we learned a lot from the EU and GDPR. We are learning from what you guys are doing.

How can small businesses face the difficulty of fighting against big tech companies and how can the government help them challenge the monopoly? Should specific regulation for small businesses be promoted by the state?

I don’t think these large companies are actually damaging smaller businesses. Like I said before, every business starts small. Amazon is a perfect example: you had to figure out how to sell, and now everyone has their own little way of selling things because they have created a platform for small businesses to flourish. Another example is Uber, one of the companies in the sharing economy. People who didn’t and couldn’t have a job, could now drive and make money. These large companies are serving as a catalyst for small businesses. The question is how can we come together and figure out how to invest together. Take Google, for example: how could you sell online flowers or tell people that you are a mechanic based around the corner? How could you sell your digital graphic design company? It’s much easier to spread the word online than it is going door to door. You have a much bigger reach. We have more little businesses today than we ever had before. Two out of three jobs when I was in the Obama administration were created by small businesses. Necessity is the mother of innovation. We need tax incentives for small businesses. Once you make a revenue, then you can be taxed. You couldn’t have taxed Facebook when they made no money. The idea is to stimulate growth.

What are the major differences in terms of regulation and support of innovation in Europe and America?

We have stimulated a lot of venture capital. The venture capital community in the US is very big. But they didn’t start from anything. The US government programmed their regroup because the VC community knows how to invest. Policy makers have never started a company, so they don’t know how to invest. So we financed and asked them to go and invest in the craziest idea, or the most disruptive technologies: “we want you to invest in women, we want you to invest in veterans, we want you to invest in minorities, we want you to invest in disadvantaged areas.” Because we have a lot of resources that are not being used. And the government said that if these investments fail, we take the guarantee, and this makes the difference. We have 20 times more investment in the US than we do in Europe. Horizon 2020 was created with models like the SBIR program and it has accomplished Quacom, IRobot, Apple. All these companies that you see, started with help. For example, Under Armour started with a 17.500$ loan and now it is a 2 billion-dollar company. Also, 23% of everything that the US Government buys, has to come from small businesses, and 5% of that, has to come from a women-owned company. That’s 17 billion dollars a year that the government has to buy from a small women-owned company.

So empowering the business community and having governments stating and buying from small businesses is important. While the US government buys 23% of its needs from small businesses, in Spain this percentage is 2%. We have to make governments understand that this is something positive, that it encourages small businesses to grow and it doesn’t cost the government much. When I was in the Obama administration, we had a great partnership with Europe, for example, in intellectual property, in patent processes. We really worked with the EU to figure out how to make their process better and share the idea of IP. So if you have produced something here, it is much easier for you to also get the patent in the US, and vice versa. It is about dialogue, about having an honest conversation, sharing research, sharing information about innovation and opening our borders, because we don’t live in a bubble, we live in a world where there are no real boundaries.

Obama advised that the digital revolution has to evolve in parallel with society, this is also something we focus on at DFS. Disruptive innovation affects society at every level, cultural and political, and yet, it seems that innovation often comes before consideration of its ethical impact. How is this evolving?

From an ethical perspective, the question is: when do we cross the ethical line when it comes to figuring out the digital divide? DFS is a great organization, it is a great think tank and it has done an amazing job in making sure that there is an open discussion. Because we don’t come up with ideas just like that. President Obama’s first executive order was open data: how do we use what we have in the government in order for others to be able to take it and make it better? We are a small government, we can’t just invent everything. We need this idea of innovation, but there has to be infrastructure and a framework of policies for how are you going to use the data.

In the Obama administration, one of the things that the President really emphasized is to figure out how to trust each other. If we start by completely distrusting each other, then we don’t have a good conversation. We cannot move the needle and make things happen. President Obama repeated to us many many times how we had to be as ethical as possible and we had to make sure that nothing that we did was personal: everything we did had to be recorded so the public knew what we were talking about and that didn’t happen before. The data that we gave out was declassified as a way of saying this is information that can be useful. Before, reporters couldn’t get access to this information. And that information is key because the whole idea of doing reports, the whole idea of educating the public, is being able to use the data that you as a taxpayer pay for.

Has this been continued?

Our government still continues to run this very well. It is just that we have a lot of noise right now with interesting leaders. We believe very much in figuring out the greater good. We have great civil employees. When an administration comes in, this administration is small because they haven’t been able to get a lot of people in, so it has allowed for many civil employees to step up and continue our programs because they haven’t been able to develop new ones. As Americans, we try to come together as a country and we try to solve things making sure that there is a balance: that’s why we have the three branches in government. We have the right to many things. And that makes us as citizens able to step in if there are crazy leaders or if they do crazy things.

Recently, it has been announced that the next supercomputer will be installed in Barcelona, what do you think about this and how is it going to help?

I think innovation is terribly important, but technology like blockchain and quantum computing are just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much data out there, and younger generations are using it in any possible way. So, how do we make that data quality data? How do we quantify the ideas and bring more transparency? I am excited that Barcelona is a place where this will be installed, because here things that would normally take a couple of months, could take a couple of seconds. I am hoping that Barcelona will be a place in Europe where you can come and have that ability. With all the data that the government has, now they can create systems that will make it easier for journalists to report on. That is what is interesting about blockchain, that citizens will be able to have a bigger input. Having data in order to help people make better choices is the way to go. In fact, at the University of Pennsylvania, we had the first supercomputer. It was a partnership between the Department of Defense and my university, and we were able to access the facility which made us see what it meant for the rest of the world because it wasn’t just for the Department of Defense, now it was useful for academics too. That was a revolution in the IT world.