When Francisco Polo, the former CEO of Change.org in Spain, was named the new Secretary of State to grow the country’s digital economy earlier this year, one of the first things he changed was the name of his portfolio.
“Spain has the chance to become a digital country that is innovative and prosperous,” he tweeted in July. “Today we take a step forward by changing the name of this Secretary of State. From today, it’s the Secretary of State for Digital Advancement.”
By renaming the portfolio – it was simply “Digital Agenda” under the former Conservative government – Polo and the Socialist government he’s part of sought to send out a powerful message of not just change, but also of progress.
“One of this Government’s major plans is to turn Spain into an Entrepreneurial Nation… into an international reference for technological innovation,” Polo wrote in his blog earlier this month about heading a delegation to the Silicon Valley.
And progress it seems, for both Polo and his boss Nadia Calviño, the powerful economy minister, would come from two key drivers: the rollout of Spain’s 5G infrastructure and gender equality.
Deploying 5G would be “fundamental” to the great technological leap that Spain is eyeing, Polo has said, since the connectivity from 5G forms the backbone of all smart technologies, particularly the so-called Internet of Things, including autonomous cars
A more digitalized economy, however, risks worsening gender inequality – and so Polo wants more women to pursue education and careers in STEM: “We have the chance to turn Spain into a country where women in tech from all over the world would want to come and work.”
Roots in activism
For years, Polo, who also heads Science, Entrepreneurship and Innovation in the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE), was one of the most visible faces of online activism. The Valencian quit Change.org in May 2017 and announced he was spending “the next 12 months of his life listening and learning from great education, science and entrepreneurship experts, in order to articulate an economic and social vision of Spain’s future.” In June 2018, he was named to the government.
Polo is not a political novice. His relationship with PSOE started in 2009, when he joined the party as adviser to the Secretariat of International Policy, a post he held until the end of 2010. Before, he was an associate consultant in the Sociedad de las Indias Electrónicas (Society of the Electronic Indies), a company working with innovation, social networking and new technological tools.
As an entrepreneur, Polo shot to fame in 2007 when he replicated and scaled a successful two-week campaign against cluster bombs. By 2016, he was named Entrepreneur of the Year by the European University of Madrid. It all started with an online activism platform that became the fastest-growing platform for petitions in Spain.
That platform was Actuable, which, within just one year of running and with almost 700,000 users, was acquired by and merged into Change.org. The merged platform went on to grow to 2.5 million users in just 18 months in Spain. According to Polo, one of the reasons for the rapid growth was “he had already done his homework” nine months before the launch of Actuable. That means that the site already had paying clients from the beginning, making the business sustainable.
Polo served as CEO of Change.org Spain from 2012 to 2017. The success of Actuable and subsequently of Change.org in Spain wasn’t a coincidence. Polo understood clearly the need for a powerful and well-designed online platform. Under his leadership, Spain became the country with the highest proportion of Change.org users in the world, or 15% of internet users, which translated to more than 5 million.
Success once more?
As Secretary of State, however, Polo faces way greater challenges. The new European Copyright Directive that came into effect in June could endanger the business model of many Spanish startups, for example, obliging them to put in place filters for user-generated content that are costly and hard to implement.
The massive unemployment in Spain, especially among youth, also worries him. With 5.6 million without jobs and a 52% youth unemployment, Polo has spoken about the lack of relevant training for the 21st-century professional (universities aren’t equipped for this). Instead, he believes education should be based on values, especially that of entrepreneurship, and of optimism and the commitment to fight for change.
One of the more positive effects of the 2008 economic crisis is that the economy managed to rid itself of many companies that were unsustainable, lacking strong business models or had become obsolete. While it was painful for those who didn't survive, at the same time, it presented a great and rare opportunity for others to launch new companies and new business models that would offer innovative solutions to old and current problems.
And Polo knows this only too well. He had launched in the middle of the economic crisis a platform that allowed anyone and everyone to start and win campaigns promoting social change, while getting NGOs to pay for services publicizing theirs. Hopefully it’s a success he would be able to replicate as Spain’s digital economy head.
