The 2016 Adigital Communication Award

It’s my pleasure to announce that after being a runner up in 2014 and 2015, this year I have been awarded the Communication and Dissemination Prize from the prestigious Spanish Digital Economy Association (Adigital).

I would like to extend my sincere congratulations to Spanish business daily Expansión and Spanish company Hipertextual, nominated in the same category, along with the nominees in other categories.

News of my award came as I flew to the Future of Advertising conference in Santo Domingo. The prize was collected on my behalf by my good friend and colleague of many years, Félix Valdivieso, the director of communication at IE Business School, where I teach, and somebody who has always encouraged myself and other teaching staff to play an active role in the media.

I ended up in communication and teaching pretty unintentionally. I started at IE Business School because one of the most iconic professors there, Jose Mario Álvarez de Novales, convinced me to give it a try. I became involved in communication as a way of extending my teaching activities and keeping my material up to date.

I soon realized that as well as the positive impact my extra-curricular activities had on my students, attending conferences opened up many new doors. As technology improved I was able to publish my own work, and since then, I haven’t stopped.

For me, communication is a way of helping others understand that there are alternative ways to do things as we move into the future; it’s a way of resisting the inertia that tends to take over our lives and activities, carrying on in our old ways despite the evolution taking place around us that offer so many new possibilities.

Communication is not just about making complex things sound simple: it is also about overcoming those who resist technological progress because it challenges them, despite the good it can do for society as a whole. My work in communication, in whichever format, is about that, about pushing for change, about seeing change as progress, as an opportunity, not a threat.

In closing, I would like to reiterate that I consider myself very fortunate to belong to an academic institution that gives its teaching staff freedom, allowing me to spread the word about my ideas without hindrance or having to run it past any editorial board.

Once again, many thanks to everybody.

(En español, aquí)