INNOVASOUTH Partnership

In collaboration with:

Eduardo Saad-Diniz, Associate Professor of Criminology and Criminal Law, University of São Paulo (Ribeirao Preto Law School and Latin American Studies Program), Brazil – eduardo.saaddiniz@usp.br

Carolina Busco, Gerente General at CB Estudios de Organización & Entorno Professor of Innovation at School of Industrial Engineering, Universidad Diego Portales (UDP), Chile. cbusco@cbestudios.cl

Latin America and Africa share many of the needs related to the Sustainable Development Goals. With COVID-19 this challenge has increased,  they are both highly affected, top victims of the pandemic. There is a pressing need to promote innovative solutions and both regions also have specialized knowledge, professional expertise and brilliant young people to generate ideas that can help change lives.

This partnership provides a platform for students, young professionals, academics, and experts in Latin American countries to share their expertise and experience with each other. But it also promotes Knowledge Exchange activities with colleagues in Africa and globally. 

We want to invite you to share best practices and help us generate a virtual market, where young entrepreneurs can show their projects in initiatives such as Ideas for Action, Africa COVID-19 Challenge and others to come. Please contact us to have a conversation on possible strategic alliances!

Words by Eduardo Saad-Diniz On the Partnership

In collaboration with Prof. Carolina Busco, from Chile, we promote the development of innovative solutions to social challenges in the Latin American region. We encourage young entrepreneurs to come up with new ideas and make the best use of local limited resources.   

It is quite pleasant to work with young scholarship in Latin America. They are remarkably creative and have a strong sense of solidarity. Most of the time, the main challenge is simply a question of enhancing their capabilities to design feasible proposals, understand the obstacles of financing it, and provide consistent metrics related to the outcomes that are expected.   

Right now, the idea is to mobilize our academic network to face the challenges brought by the COVID-19 in Africa. What makes the Latin American perspective so promising for us are the affinities we observe when we look at local vulnerable communities. Cross-cultural analyzes could ensure a more realistic approach to the need of creating capacities and promote knowledge exchange among both disenfranchised sides of the Global South. Sometimes, a South-South (peripheral- peripheral) collaboration could be much more sensible to the context and inspire more effective strategies. The social disorganization in both Latin America and Africa turned the “stay at home” attitude into an uncomfortable policy. Worse than this, the COVID-19 found a fertile ambience in both regions, reproducing the incestuous relationship between extreme poverty, marginalization, and increasing levels of structural violence.     

Non substantial measures coming from the private sector, mostly very limited to donations or alcohol gel distribution, bring up many contradictions and a moral split between saving unstructured markets or promoting better and healthier social conditions. The allocation of resources raises a wide range of accountability issues. Realistic solutions can´t avoid holding responsible those who misuse the emergency regime brought by the crisis. Proposals should be thinking in transformative leadership and more consistent evidence-based assessments of what kind of initiative could have a greater impact on the exact extent it expresses the integrity of the interventions to fight the COVID-19.   

It is quite inspiring to work with Wharton scholars and learn from their vocation to promote knowledge for social change. Within this ambience, I am personally engaged in a much more contemporary work on how to use innovative ideas to keep the world population safe from the damages caused by the “Corona- Crisis”. It is a tremendous opportunity to join an initiative oriented to address knowledge as social change for the most-need. Once your proposal gives visibility and reaches out the top victims of the pandemic, I am quite sure that you will be warmly welcomed by this initiative!  Please, don´t hesitate to contact us and share your thoughts and put your ideas into action.  

Eduardo Saad-Diniz

Associate Professor of Criminology and Criminal Law, University of São Paulo (Ribeirao Preto Law School and Latin American Studies Program), Brazil – eduardo.saaddiniz@usp.br

Words by Carolina Busco On the Partnership

Over the last years, along with Prof. Eduardo Saad-Diniz we’ve been engaged in the diffusion of Ideas for Action in Latin America. Now we want to use our network and enrich it, in order to face the challenges COVID-19 has caused in Africa. We strongly support the creativity and commitment of young entrepreneurs who are willing to organize themselves in groups that embody diversity, considering different nationalities, gender, professions and areas of specialization.

We also believe in encouraging young people to create value with social impact. Creativity, social and environmental commitment along with businesses can be a powerful tool to change the world, and our role is to connect them to influential networks that will allow them to prosper. Until now, we have connected professors with the same motivation in countries like, Chile, Brazil or Colombia. And through them, this initiative has reached the best students and ideas.

Besides the strategic level, I am personally engaged in motivating my students to understand the role they play in solving global issues related to Sustainable Development Goals. My role as a professor of Innovation at the School of Industrial Engineering at Universidad Diego Portales has implied a huge challenge. Civil engineers in Chile tend to see themselves as development actors and professionals that will mainly work for the private sector, where efficiency towards money creation is the sole purpose.

In this context, when I begin each semester telling my students that as civil engineers they are also expected to lead projects with social impact, they start feeling strange. When I tell them that as fifth year students they know everything they need and this is the moment to integrate knowledge creatively, they feel scared. And when they acknowledge that they will be presenting a real project to great institutions, such as the World Bank and the Wharton School, they simply panic.

Motivating students to commit deeply with something and be willing to lead others takes whole lots of energy, but the results almost always pay out. We have learned along the years that the process of deciding the problem they want to address is fundamental. The usual recommendation is to go out for a drink, have a nice time and discuses ideas they are passionate about. Another starting point is to think about those things that we observe on a daily basis and would like to change in order to have a better society.

But with COVID’s confinement, not only their meetings where remote, but also the teachers feedback was no longer inside a classroom. We held at least one meeting through Zoom, where everyone was at their own favorite spot and I am confident it helped enrich the creative process. After a thorough brain storming, I would make them see the benefits of each idea, the need of consolidating technology and how to understand scalability. Even though it can be fun, even though it has a social benefit, the project should be economically sustainable and solve problems in other parts of the world. Then, along the semester Tamara Araya, the class brilliant assistant, a young and committed industrial engineer, helps the student materialize their ideas in to a viable project.

Design thinking, problem solving technics, stakeholder’s theory, social innovation, the challenges and opportunities given by the fourth industrial revolution and the lean startup methodology are some of the topics we discuss. But innovation is an ongoing prosses, and no professor has all the knowledge and expertise, so we also organize expert master classes. This semester, via Zoom, we have listened about Circular economy, Big Data and IA, and StartUp Chile.

Please, contact us to share what works in other countries, how to engage institution and how to connect our young entrepreneurs with similar problems around the world.

Carolina Busco

Gerente General at CB Estudios de Organización & Entorno Professor of Innovation at School of Industrial Engineering, Universidad Diego Portales (UDP), Chile. cbusco@cbestudios.cl