The Vagueness Of Technology: MICTT

The vice-president of the Balearics, Biel Barceló, is best known for being tourism minister. He has another specific ministerial responsibility that is less well known: innovation and research. This area of activity was one that featured as, if not more prominently than tourism in his party's manifesto. Més, like Podemos, place a great deal of emphasis on innovation and the development and exploitation of new technologies. While these are a feature of tourism, they obviously apply more widely, but whereas we have heard a good deal about Barceló's proposals for tourism, such as the tourist tax, we have heard very little about innovation and research.

Prior to the election, Més proposed creating a digital area out of the Gesa building and its surroundings in Palma. Quite what they had in mind wasn't entirely clear. We may get to know more, as the Més man in Palma, deputy mayor Antoni Noguera, works up his vision of the "model city". We can hope that whatever Noguera and Barceló want for technology, it doesn't go the same way as ambitions of previous regimes. Proudly proclaimed, they came to little or nothing, and yet it is new technologies which offer Mallorca a way out of its massive over-dependence on the tourism industry, if only a relatively small way out.

We have had (and still hear occasionally) the claims of a Silicon Valley in Mallorca, one mainly the product of the ParcBit estate. But such claims, with their extravagant use of hyperbole, are easily enough made. Actually doing something about them is a very different matter.

Back in the days of Francesc Antich and the PSOE-led administration of 2007 to 2011, there were two grand plans. One was the Plan Turismo 2020. Under this, tourist numbers were to be cut, but those that remained would be of greater "quality" and have more money. Sounds familiar, doesn't it. The other was the I&D plan, one for innovation and development. Come the election in 2011, and both had been more or less forgotten. The Antich administration could perhaps point to the mitigating effect of economic crisis for investment on I&D having fallen from the 2005 figure of 183 million euros of the previous Matas Partido Popular government to only 55 million euros in 2009. But the one third cut to this investment from 2008 to 2009 was not mirrored in other regions of Spain. There were increases elsewhere: 25% in Madrid, 12% in Aragon, for example.

Crisis or not, it wasn't as if Antich was being penalised by Madrid. He had Zapatero in charge and a PSOE government that was more generous in its financing of and investment in the Balearics than was to become the case with Rajoy. Yet somehow, the great scheme (never well enunciated) for innovation failed to materialise. Except in one way. Materialise it did in the form of the Big M: Microsoft.

Here was a marriage of new techologies and tourism. The clue was in the title: the Microsoft Innovation Center Tourism Technologies, MICTT, in ParcBit. In a way, it was a misleading name. Microsoft, though it gave the use of its name, didn't actually fund it. Yes, it was to be the principal client. Yes, it was to be involved in some significant projects of direct relevance to the tourism industry. Yes, it was to provide consultancy services in boosting the island's technology industry. But the funding was to come from elsewhere.

In 2010, the Antich administration did increase its I&D budget, but it was from such a low base that the percentage of GDP devoted to it was by then the lowest of any region of Spain. The Bauzá government wasn't much better. Indeed it was, as far as the MICTT was concerned, worse. Not only wasn't investment forthcoming, the government displayed, as is now being said by the board of its foundation, incompetence.

Yet Bauzá was able to show the then Crown Prince Felipe and his wife the touchscreen virtual map of all manner of tourist attractions, points of interest, beaches and so on for use at travel fairs. There was to be a "killer app", a Mallorca tourism hub for the Windows Phone. There was to be the database of locations around Mallorca where there had been filming, replete with relevant videos. The realities were to be different, and now there is nothing of the centre. It has filed for bankruptcy, unable any longer to sustain its debts.

The incompetence was not that of the Bauzá government alone. The Antich administration had launched the project with a great fanfare, but from the outset there was never a clear strategic plan for the centre. A lot of talk and not much else, which brings us to Barceló and to Noguera. What do they mean by a digital area? Do they know?