Start-Up Chile case study arrives at Harvard

The prestigious American university’s business school is set to include in its classes details of the origin, evolution and success of this public program for high-impact start-ups.

Start-Up Chile is continuing to set milestones at an international level. As well as being considered one of the global ecosystem’s best business accelerators, CORFO’s program is now set to be taught as a case study at the prestigious Harvard University.

It all started last September. Pedro Levindo and Ruth Costas reached out to Start-Up Chile directly from Harvard Business School (HBS). They were interested in doing a follow-up to find out what new challenges the public business accelerator was facing, how it had developed and how performance had been going over time. After a few months, they confirmed that the business school would use Start-Up Chile as a case study in their classes.

Among the areas covered by the case study are the creation and evolution of the program, the various success stories which have now become Unicorn companies (NotCo, Betterfly, Cabify, GoodMeal, The Live Green Co, etc.), as well as the challenges it faces, such as the recruitment of technological talent in Chile, staying competitive in a global and regional ecosystem, and the sustainability of the program over time.

“This study highlights the value of the experience of Chile’s first public business accelerator and the first to come about under the CORFO banner. It analyzes the successes, failures and lessons learnt, as well as how the program has taken on new roles in both the national and international innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem,” affirms CORFO’s Executive Vice President, José Miguel Benavente. He added that the program “is becoming an attractive case study which, on the basis of facts and evidence, provides the opportunity to imagine potential pathways and guide start-ups’ strategic decisions towards the goal of becoming high-impact ventures that can contribute towards a country’s social, economic and cultural development.”

María de los Ángeles Romo, Manager of Start-Up Chile, says that “being recognized by a university as prestigious as Harvard gives us the opportunity to reach a much wider audience. Start-Up Chile is here for those who today are students, but who tomorrow will be entrepreneurs, leaders of big businesses, of venture capital funds and/or will be inserted, by some other method, into this environment. This process will ultimately contribute to the consolidation of the innovative, entrepreneurial and venture capital ecosystem, not just in Chile, but all over the world”.

Did you know that Chile is considered a country of early adopters? Our innovation and entrepreneurial ecosystem makes it ideal for trying out new products and technologies. We invite you to get to know just a few of the foreign start-ups who have chosen Chile as their base for operations.

Source: El Mercurio.