Sowing The Seeds

And following on from yesterday. There was a bit of a jolly with worthies attending a conference on the need for innovation. A good excuse, as always, for some nice photos of politicans and others, listening (intently?) to the worthy speeches. The upshot of all this was that there needs to be innovation in Mallorca and the Balearics. Yes, I think we kind of got that. And that there needs to be much investment in human capital, which is management speak for training. The thing is that there is neither a tradition of innovation here nor a natural focal point to facilitate it. Nor is this necessarily a land of entrepreneurs. The structure for allowing innovation to flourish demands physical representations such as science and technology parks, financial impetus in the form of seed funding, a mental approach that does not squash risk, and good training and development. Whether Mallorca is ready for any of this, or capable of it, I don’t know.

And then there is government spending. Madrid has agreed to cough up a tad over 400 million euros for new road projects on the island, many of them designed to alleviate the numerous bottlenecks around Palma. All of this will be very much welcome. As I pointed out on 8 July (“Same As It Ever Was”), “it’s just - the road infrastructure in and around Palma is bad. It has inherent inefficiency; it is a hindrance to productivity.”


CROCS UPDATE
As promised, I duly studied feet at the Hospital d’Alcúdia. Yep. Crocs. Great swamps of them. White ones, blue ones, pink ones. Not the colours of the rainbow, more a washed-out or sun-bleached Union Jack range of colours. Can’t say that any life-saving equipment was being interfered with, but - as coincidence would have it - another hospital story has emerged (from “Euro Weekly”); allegedly someone died because an emergency call button was not functioning at the Playa de Muro hospital. One of my neighbours is a director there. Don’t think I’ll be bringing it up in conversation somehow.


QUIZ
Yesterday - Simply Red, “Money’s Too Tight To Mention”. Today’s title - it’s another song title with a missing couple of words. Who?

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