This is the year of generational changes in Spain: first the king, then Botín, and this week Dimas at El Corte Inglés. It's certainly going to be very exciting seeing how these three great institutions tackle the issue of modernization and adapting to new consumers/citizens.

I'd love to know what would have happened to the monarchy 50 years ago, with the Internet, Podemos and globalization. Or what Botín would have done 50 years ago with multi-channel retailing hot on his heels, in the midst of an extreme lack of confidence in the banking sector among consumers. Or for that matter how Isidoro Álvarez would have reacted 50 years ago if his competitor had been Amazon rather than Galerías Preciados.

The digital era is clearly a challenge for every type of business: the new digital competitors have no regard for the traditional rules of the game, while the new consumers succumb almost irrationally to technological novelties. You need look no further than Apple's rollout of its new cellphones, iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus in the U.S. and Asian markets. Long queues and enormous expectation preceded the launch of these larger terminals from the Cupertino brand, and the day that ten countries received the new products was marked by collective hysteria and all kinds of curious anecdotes.

This was also the week of an historic event: the largest and most successful IPO in New York ever to take place, courtesy of the company ALIBABA. (If you'd told a Spanish entrepreneur 50 years ago that a Chinese entrepreneur would take the New York stock exchange by storm with an e-commerce company based in the Cayman Islands, he would have died of shock!) The Chinese online company created in 1999 is now worth more than Facebook, nearly as much as IBM and JP Morgan, the largest bank in the United States, and four times more than the world's second-largest car manufacturer, General Motors. It has also become the most valuable company in China, having even overtaken Tencent, another technology company. Founded 15 years ago in an apartment in Hangzhou with a loan of $60,000, today the company boasts 279 million active users in more than 190 countries and handles approximately 14.5 billion operations through its various portals on the Internet. Last year Alibaba earned $3.7 billion on revenue of $8.4 billion. It employs 25,000 people to run the Alibaba.com portal and the search engine eTao. It also has its own online payment technology, Alipay, which makes it a mixture of Amazon, eBay and PayPal.

But the recent generational changes in the Spanish business world are just the tip of the iceberg. Democracy brought multiple opportunities and hundreds of companies were created to meet hundreds of needs in our country. Now let's see whether the present generations will be capable of revitalizing their parents' companies in a context that is radically different from the 1970s, with the digital revolution in full swing.

Now more than ever before, the digitization of business processes, e-commerce, internationalization, customer orientation and innovation will be key factors for "rejuvenating" these companies and institutions.

It will be thrilling to see in ten years' time whether these companies have managed to pull it off and are still the leaders of their markets, or whether they have succumbed to traditionalism and failed.

Pascual, Inditex, Ferrovial, Planeta, Barceló, Catalana Occidente, Santander, Mango, El Corte Inglés, Puig, Esteve, Globalia, Mercadona, Almirall, etc. versus Google, Facebook, Amazon, Alibaba et al will be a battle worth watching.

These new generations of entrepreneurs are undoubtedly better educated than their predecessors. The question is, will they be in time to modernize their companies and compete with these fast and powerful digital-era players?