La Cocreadora

In LatinAmerica, MSMEs (micro and SMEs) generate half of the jobs in the region. They represent 90% of the business landscape and are accountable for 28% of the GDP. Despite their significant contribution to the economy, they are not yet a prioritized sector to launch policies that address innovation and upskilling their talent. Although different efforts have been made in order to support blooming entrepreneurial ecosystems in the region, traditional MSME are not necessarily part of these scope.

La Cocreadora offers a digital platform to help these MSMEs to identify/ develop skills for innovation. Through different human resourses´training and education tools, people will develop five skills and be more qualified to tackle challenges: leadership, observation, creation, networking and experimentation. 

Human resources have also different roles to innovate in their teams and organizations, depending of a certain project or challenge. Our solution can reach many regions and communities, scaling-up its impact.

SMEs or entrepreneurs represent over 95 percent of all companies in Latin America, they provide between 40%-60% of all jobs, are accountable for 30%-50% of GDP. The way they behave and interact can have a significant impact on society and the environment.Training is crucial to boost innovation among their frame of influence.

People who work at these SMEs usually base their business based in their vocational training or practical experience. Although life-long learning is their main asset, they have rarely been trained to improve skills  that help them to manage their businesses or how to address the challenges they face in managing, developing and growing them.

Our solution is primarily focused on developing people's soft skills and their abilities to tackle challenges. Additionally, the platform offers more than 100 day-to-day challenges. Thus, they can use the platform as a tool to address challenges when they arise, to integrate their teams in this dynamic and take advantage or the different roles of team members. The tool allows them to become a personalized coach in real time. 

Our solution is aimed to help MSME owners and entrepreneurs who are in a continuous search to improve their product / services portafolio.

The founder of La Cocreadora has a more than 20 years of expertise working with individuals, teams and organizations that continuosly seek to innovate. So, from the beginning of the solution's creation, focus groups were created to generate discoveries about their skills, develop their needs and tackle the challenges they were facing.

In addition to the focus groups,  we gathered valuable data doing field research such as coworking spaces visits, interaction with entrepreneurs, and literature research to understand these essential challenges of entrepreneurs and MSME owners. 

Over time, the solution has created several feedback opportunities to improve the value proposition. The digital platform is fully geared to those development needs and challenges.

La Cocreadora is a digital platform for capacity building, since it helps to develo skills and to tackle challenges in an innovative way in small businesses and enterprises.

The platform is designed to be used primarily by small work teams that are collaboratively and jointly tackling challenges together. For this reason, the platform has two roles: "Agent" user and another "Leader" user.

For the "Agent" user, the platform offers the possibility to continuosly develope their capabilities, learning and improvements. Specifically, this offers the following functions:

1. Recognize your skills, identify your profile and find out your innovation role. The skills that are evaluated are 5: to lead, to observe, to create, to experiment and to connect. The profiles are three (3): mobilizer, researcher and creator. The roles are 9: Visionary, Collaborator, Coach., Tester, Explorer, Scientist, Narrator, Designer and Modeller.

2. From these skills, profiles and roles, the user "Agent" can choose between 60 rituals (exercises) to develop and enhance their profile.

3. Additionally, this user also has a base of standardized challenges. That is a base with more than 70 challenges where the user receives an explanation step by step,  to know how to tackle those challenges. For the user, this is an advantage for having a logic of how to tackle challenges that are strategic on a daily basis.

For the "Leader" user, the platform offers the same possibilities as the "Agent" user, plus several functions to streamline work teams.

1. Ability to structure and create work groups on the platform to analyze the individual results of the "Agent" users of their work group.

2. Analyze the results of the groups cross-sectionally.

3. Facilitate recognition mechanisms and incentives for users to address challenges. Recognition mechanisms such as Quizs (individual) and medal awards (social).

4. Select and send challenges to "Agent" users to solve.

These two users generate a continuous transformation experience of skills.

La Cocreadora's proposal offers an innovative approach to skills development because it measures skills development in real time, through individual and social recognition. That makes people continually improving and wanting to develop new skills.

On the other hand, the platform offers more than 100 defined challenges, offering a taxonomy of great value to users to tackle their daily challenges.

Typically, skill development platforms and programs focus on one-off exercises rather than programs that help you develop challenges by providing you with a huge database of "recipes" to tackle them.

In these period of time, people have evaluated the use of the solutions in very satisfactory ways.

The first evidence is in the profiling of the tool. The platform, having the results data, generates users profiles. After having carried out more than 500 test, we carried out surveys and interviews to show that 93% of the people felt very identified with the results. Only 2% said they did not feel identified with the results.

In these lasts months, we have implement some specific content about the challenges which we only were able to research the user experience with more qualitative research. These research yielded some improvements and some good comments on its relevance. I mean

At the time we are a compact and trustable team with a clear common purpose. One sales person, one developer, one visual designer, one social media communicator and one knowledge.