In the port of Las Palmas, where reality weighs like steel and the dense aroma of bunker fuel lingers, modernity has decided to settle under the Anglicism of ‘co-creation.’ This Tuesday at the SPEGC venue, this day of Challenge Gran Canaria has been staged, a kind of laboratory of ideas where José Juan Socas, from the presidency of Fedeport and Somar Capital, has observed how the future of the dock sought to be designed with the precision of a stopwatch and sprint methodology. But beyond the rhetoric of panels and the agility of offices, the truly substantial aspect has been the role of the guardians of real business. Companies of the stature of Oryx Energies, Minerva Bunkering, and Alfaship have temporarily left the control room of their operations to serve as mentors in this exercise of digital balancing act. They are the ones who know the language of supply and dispatch, providing a counterpoint of sensibility to the abstraction of algorithms. The presence of these giants is not trivial. Oryx Energies and Minerva Bunkering, which dominate the fuel pulse in the Central Atlantic, and Alfaship, with its refined logistics vision, have served as the necessary anchor to ensure that sustainability and digitalization projects do not end up being mere castles of cards. In this open innovation laboratory, their work has consisted of translating rapid entrepreneurship theory into the language of docking, ensuring that proposals for the ‘Ideas Ports 4.0’ fund have sufficient grounding to avoid capsizing in the first tide. The business organization recognized by the CCE of Las Palmas understands well that collaboration between emerging talent and these established firms is the only way to ensure that technological transformation is not merely a decoration, but a tool for logistical sovereignty. By the end of the morning, amid post-its and projections, it has become clear that, no matter how much the port seeks its soul in the cloud, success will continue to depend on those, like ECOS or Elittoral, who know that innovation in the Canary Islands is only real if it survives contact with saltwater.
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