Chapter 3: A story of research.

Curiosity is the spark that moves things forward.

Welcome to the third chapter of the What If series. This series is the result of conversations, interviews, and reflections of remarkable people.

Their professional fields are (apparently) disconnected, from creative directors to space scientists. From video game designers to Michelin awarded chefs. From innovators in elite sports clubs to thinkers from tech. Think-tanks.

If the content is a vehicle to express ourselves, the content is also the perfect service to inspire, challenge, and provoke new ideas and ways to think.

Today I feel honored to share with you a reflection of one of the brightest minds and warm hearts I ever met. Danny Camprubí is part of the R&D team at FC. Barcelona called The Innovation Hub. A sports science research center to transform sports and technology how we know them today.

In his own words:

Behind every big team, there are hundreds of people working on many different scientific fields like genetics, the future of nutrition, tech-wearables, big data, athletic performance, and many more.

I met Danny long ago when we both lived in Barcelona and worked as strategists in advertising agencies.

Danny was also writing at one of my meccas for forward-thinking, PSFK New York, so I instantly loved his way of thinking. Danny sees the world deeply interconnected as a substantial neural net. He sees how researching quantum physics can create the TAC machine for health diagnosis, and how the TAC machine didn′t only save millions of lives; it also helped archeologists and many other fields. Everything we use for our daily lives is, in essence, coming from a pure research project.

During our conversation, Danny asked me a challenging question; it is more a dilemma:

What makes a civilization to be advanced? The technology they have or their willingness to know more?

Indeed, all the technical advances come from our willingness to know more, and thanks to these new technologies, we open further questions to be answered. But curiosity doesn′t require tools, technology, or any game-changing technique. Interest is within us. It is an emotion that brought us to discover everything that pushed the limits of our knowledge. Yesterday, today, and forever.

The more technology we have in our world, the more needed researchers are. I guess it’s not necessary to talk about our race against the clock to beat COVD-19. Thanks to this fantastic collective effort, we are on the verge of having an available vaccine. This colossal effort’s collateral effect is, to give one example, the AI-driven drug discovery.

There are many examples of how cross-industry innovation impacts our daily lives and why cooperation in research projects drives to Ideas that work.

Elite sports clubs today are no different from any other scientific research institutions. The point is that they are focused on the performance of their athletes. Every cell of an elite athlete’s body can be optimized and improved to get better results.

This mission requires research, and a trial and error approach to be successful. Over and over again. It is then not too naive to think that some of these discoveries sooner or later will end up in our nutrition plans, in our work-outs, in our sports clothes, in our daily lives.

During our conversation, Danny pointed out that they face the same scenarios that many other institutions face in his organization working on sports science. Connecting the dots and communication is critical for the world to understand and to improve altogether.

In Danny′s own words:

The Bar?a Innovation Hub was born to organize and capitalize all the accumulated knowledge of the club in its 120 years of history. All the projects in which we are involved seek to provide answers to the needs of our seven knowledge areas. We team up with our experts and collaborators to find a solution with other professionals, startups, research centers, medical centers, organizations, universities, etc.

This is a transversal approach with all stakeholders and internally in the club. The Bar?a Innovation Hub has another goal: to communicate and share our advances in the projects involved as all the research papers our club experts are engaged in. All this accumulated knowledge has allowed us to create more than 25 knowledge programs from our experts for professionals in the sports world who want to learn and advance in their careers. Collectively we are looking to push the sports industry forward and raise the bar.

We are opening up our knowledge to empower progress in the sports arena.

To give you an example, some of you are probably following the keto diet. Almost nobody knows that the ketogenic diet was not developed to lose weight or otherwise improve your health; it was originally developed as a treatment against epilepsy. The research story begins with the first modern study of fasting and its role in epilepsy, which took place in France around 1911. The outcome for the world came when the research findings were shared, and other professionals found different and exciting applications.

At this point in the conversation, Danny used his communication background and said:

Here is the thing, how much of these outstanding research does the society know?

In recent studies about sleeping cycles, researchers found that an excess of sleeping can affect the athlete′s metabolism and performance. What can be considered a lot? Well, it depends on every metabolism. This question is a beautiful complication.

What if this finding can be the key to understand our children better? What if results like this can help us to prevent lots of potential diseases years before they appear? What if people that society considers today mentally slower or less intelligent could unlock their brain potential thanks to findings like this? The scientific community is plenty of news like this every day, amazing discoveries with substantial global impact potential.

And this is why we need science communicators, I said.

Danny explained why it is ultra-important that the scientific world teams up with communicators, brand strategists, and creatives.

For example, engineers at Tufts University in Massachusetts have successfully built the first flexible electronic sensing patch that will detect important biomarkers that will allow us to diagnose and monitor chronic health conditions during athletic or workplace performance.

Can you imagine the next generation of wearables? This patch technology will be a break-through for the remote medical services area. Can you imagine that the guys working to announce the technology that Apple uses in its devices could also do the same for this project?

Since we democratized commercial innovation with platforms like Kick-Starter or Patreon, among others, we broke the barrier that said that innovation was only possible for companies or people with resources. Innovation went mainstream, and today many people are taking part in the next idea that will change the world.

People have a direct information channel about these projects; they can know more if they want and be part of them. It is a fantastic communication exercise. Science took terrific steps forward with people like Carl Sagan or Neil deGrasse Tyson. Platforms like National Geographic, Nature, or the Science magazine, among others, are communicating scientific findings and stimulating curiosity in people for decades.

But, even with these resources, the scientific community remains uncrackable for the vast majority of people.

Danny referred to the sports scientific world in terms of the trend world. Scientists are the true trends-setters, those guys that decide to wear clothes from the 1930s because of X-Y-Z. These guys are not interested in making the mass to understand their thoughts or the potential applications of their total look as a fashion trend. They wear these clothes in their little groups and try new combinations every day.

The first folks that can see the potential of this trend are the early adopters. Those guys that started to say to everybody that wearing sweatpants (now renamed as joggers) every day will be the next big thing. The same guys that saw the application of the touchscreen technology or the LED technology for vehicles.

When you and I know about these remarkable technologies and want to buy them and adopt them in our lives to preach their magic qualities, we are what the trend world calls the followers.

When my parents send me thousands of gifs of the grumpy cat on WhatsApp, the trend world would consider them the laggards.

I am not saying that everybody should be so science-savvy to understand what the antimatter is, or what the antimatter could be because its existence remains unproven. But if the scientific world and communicators work closely, people could start to be curious about it and see that the future of home energy can be something close to Radiant.

I saw the moment from hearing older people talking about football at my favorite bar to talk about the aerodynamic coefficient and diffusers in the F1 cars. I also remember when people started talking about full-carbon bicycles with fast-changing wheels. Or when people began to wear dry-fit equipment to do sports.

All these innovations are the result of a scientific research project and also of a tremendous communication effort.

What if we could know the positive side-effects of the research projects to beat the COVID-19? What if these findings could show us why some older people survived and why some kids didn′t? What if scientific research would close even more the gap with communicators? What if society would stimulate our scientific curiosity from a very early stage like the entrepreneur spirit?

New generation content like National Geographic′s One Strange Rock is setting a new level of scientific communication. If I would see things like this when I was young, I would probably have had studied sciences.

We live in the most technological moment of our history as a species. In the digital revolution, the 4rth industrial revolution, science is part of our daily lives more than ever before.

The society is ready to know more, to embrace discoveries. People are ready to see the news about alien life, about the first mission to Mars, about the cure for cancer.

In the era of information overload, it is necessary to reconnect and inform from the knowledge fruit of research in any field. 

The impetus and curiosity is the driver of this.