Entrepreneurship & Innovation · Innovation Management

Mobilizing What We Know — Reviving Innovation at Sendoa Systems

A four-round, advanced knowledge-management and intellectual-capital simulation set inside Sendoa Systems S.A., a Bilbao high-tech firm (EUR 86M revenue, 16% EBITDA, 540 staff, 310 engineers) whose innovation engine has stalled: new-product revenue has halved from 38% to 19% in four years, three senior architects

4 rounds Executive English, Español

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About this simulation

A four-round, advanced knowledge-management and intellectual-capital simulation set inside Sendoa Systems S.A., a Bilbao high-tech firm (EUR 86M revenue, 16% EBITDA, 540 staff, 310 engineers) whose innovation engine has stalled: new-product revenue has halved from 38% to 19% in four years, three senior architects holding ~EUR 2.1M of undocumented tacit knowledge have left in 18 months, and two more are eligible to retire within 18 months.

A costly knowledge platform bought in 2021 sits unused because it was deployed without incentive alignment.

Playing the new head of strategy with a EUR 5M budget and a one-year window, you (1) diagnose the binding intellectual-capital constraint across human, structural and relational capital, and recognise that fragile tacit knowledge is walking out the door; (2) allocate the EUR 5M across five knowledge-sharing mechanisms — communities of practice (EUR 0.6M), platform relaunch with curation (EUR 1.4M), expert-capture / cognitive apprenticeship (EUR 0.9M), cross-unit rotation and co-location (EUR 0.8M), and customer/university open innovation (EUR 1.2M) — concentrating on the urgent and high-impact rather than spreading thinly; (3) redesign HRM incentives so knowledge actually flows — reward sharing and reuse without cratering delivery, set protected time and curation ownership, and avoid simply relaunching the platform with the same share-versus-ship incentives that killed it in 2021; and (4) absorb a mid-year shock (lagging platform adoption plus an architect's early retirement) and commit a one-year roadmap that lifts new-product revenue back toward 30% while measuring innovation OUTPUT, not vanity activity.

The math rewards urgency-weighted, focused, incentive-aligned knowledge mobilization and punishes the five classic errors — tool without incentive, ignoring retirement urgency, even-spreading the budget, hiring as a cure-all, and measuring activity instead of innovation outcomes.

Final KPIs track the Intellectual-Capital Index, Innovation Output (new-product revenue %), Knowledge-Flow Adoption, and Tacit-Knowledge Capture against the EUR 5M cap.

Who it is for

An advanced simulation for participants used to working with the main frameworks and trade-offs of the subject, designed for executive education and experienced professionals.

How a session runs

  1. The instructor creates a session from the Eureka dashboard and invites the participants.
  2. Participants play 4 rounds. In each one they submit their decisions and the simulation calculates the results.
  3. The simulation can be run in English, Español.
  4. The instructor follows each participant's progress and results from the dashboard, and uses the class results for the debrief.

Decisions participants make

The decisions participants make during the simulation:

  • Which intellectual-capital component is Sendoa's binding constraint right now?
  • What is the most urgent, irreversible risk to weight first?
  • How rigorously does your team map the gaps by impact AND urgency, not just gut feel? (%)
  • Allocate the €5.0M across the five knowledge-sharing mechanisms (in €M, cannot exceed 5.0)
  • How do you sequence the spend over the one-year window?
  • How heavily does knowledge-sharing weigh in each engineer's bonus and promotion? (%)
  • What behaviour do you actually reward and recognise?
  • Protected time + curation ownership: how much €M to staff curation and free engineers' time?
  • Safeguards so sharing lifts innovation rather than becoming the goal itself?
  • How do you respond to the mid-year shock?

What participants track

What participants follow on screen as the rounds go by:

  • Knowledge-to-Innovation Trajectory

Subjects covered

Designed for courses in Innovation Management.

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