Leveraging Empathy to Drive Innovation

Many of our most transformative innovations have emerged from necessity. However, our most advanced technologies are often prohibitively expensive and complex, and therefore inaccessible to the people they could help most. These are also the people who could most creatively and effectively improve them.

By leveraging the immediacy with which these technologies are needed by refugees, we propose igniting such creative potential in Colombian graduates and the thousands of Venezuelans who have fled to Colombia seeking a better life, in order to make these technologies cheaper, simpler, and scalable, so that they can be immediately implemented by refugees.

Through an entrepreneurial training program, students will be exposed to our species' most innovative research in food, shelter, and medicine, while at the same time learning the technical skills necessary to hack them. The ultimate goal in doing so is to teach them how to commercialize their innovations via collaborative startups.

To date, more than four million people have left Venezuela due to food shortages, political mayhem, and hyperinflation. Over 1.3 million Venezuelans have ended up in Colombia, only to be met by a lack of economic opportunity, healthcare, cultural embrace, and education. Given that the sociopolitical circumstances in Venezuela are only getting worse, more and more citizens are fleeing each day. 

As of January, 2019, the poverty rate in Bucaramanga, Colombia was 18.9%. To make things worse, businesses are giving preference to short-term contract work, which destabilizes both young and experienced workers. A majority of those with jobs do not earn competitive salaries. Moreover, existing businesses have been resistant to adopting innovative approaches and technologies, thereby limiting their participation in the global economy. 

Predictably, massive migration into Bucaramanga has exacerbated this economic tumult, while cultural tensions are being fed by both antagonism and apathy. Many Colombians view Venezuelans as uneducated, ill-mannered, and a burden on their community, and businesses have realized that they can pay Venezuelans significantly less than Colombians for doing the same jobs. 

Thus, it will be necessary to integrate Venezuelans into the Colombian economy and re-frame how the two cultures view each other.

In terms of humanitarian goals, we are aiming to help Venezuelans create immediately effective solutions to practical survival challenges. To ensure that this population is able to comprehensively and sustainably thrive in its new home, we will develop a training program to commercialize their innovations in collaboration with recent Colombian graduates. 

In this vein, we hope to develop an experiential collectivism program designed to engender empathy and camaraderie between Colombians and Venezuelans, with the goal of making Colombia into a global case study in empathic growth. Essentially, we are committed to not only creating a mutual understanding between the two cultures, but also exploring the potential benefits of their co-existence. 

Ultimately, our goal is to show the rest of the world that intercultural empathy can drive innovation and make one's economy into a global leader by leveraging primal survival instincts to come up with creative and sustainable products and techniques that can be turned into viable businesses.

Through an intensive and ongoing series of online and in-person workshops held at local universities and businesses, we will expose groups of Venezuelans and Colombians to the most innovative research and products our species has produced. Program leaders will then work with participants to co-opt these ideas as effective survival mechanisms that can immediately improve the lives of people in need. To start, we aim to have 20 remote trainers around the globe, each of whom will teach a group of five Colombians and five Venezuelans. On the ground, there will be one local trainer assigned to each group of ten participants.  

After development of an effective process or product, business leaders and instructors will help participants commercialize the ideas that come out of this program through business training, strategic partnerships, and international investment. These training sessions will be subsidized by strategic partners and the Colombian Ministry of Education, and conducted at the Universidad Industrial de Santander UIS. The content they will cover includes financial planning, patent law, marketing, venture capital, and other critical topics. At the end of this session, each participant will have a business plan, slide deck, marketing strategy, and grant proposal template that they will present at regularly scheduled pitch sessions in front of potential investors.   

Key players in this program will be students, professors, and recent graduates from MIT and UIS, as well as the Colombian Ministry of Education and local businesses. These leaders will give participants the skills needed to make and sell almost anything, focusing on biotechnology, digital fabrication, architecture and urban planning, regenerative agriculture, and storytelling. In turn, we will partner with the local government and global businesses to incentivize Colombian students to participate in the startups that emerge from this program via subsidized internships, scholarships, and grants.

To be successful, though, such a program will rely on empathy, trust, and co-dependence. Therefore, we will hold weekly experiential learning modules in which students will learn to creatively utilize the skills they learn in the technical skills and entrepreneurial training modules, with the goal of understanding each other's perceptions, creative potential, and culture. The resulting foods, films, and artworks will be submitted to festivals and, with permission, posted to YouTube and various social media platforms. The ad space for these videos will be given for free to the startups that develop from this program.

Refugees have three main problems after fleeing to another country. The first is that they need to survive, meaning that they to sustainably provide food, shelter, and medicine to themselves and their families. The second problem is that they need access to education and meaningful work. Third, and most importantly, they need to integrate into the culture with which they now share space and find happiness and meaning in their new home. 

There are many online education platforms and companies dedicated to encouraging positive social change. There are also investment programs and NGOs that try to stimulate economic growth in the areas of the world that need it the most. However, few if any programs attempt to address the immediate problems associated with survival, then teach these populations how to commercialize the innovations that emerge as a way to encourage upward mobility, and ultimately focus on achieving happiness, social integration, and meaning. 

In addition, the ultimate goal of our program is to help displaced or marginalized populations to integrate and promote the shared economy of a dominant culture through new collaborative enterprises and artistic training that focuses on teaching and generating empathy. 

For example, growing meat in a laboratory could serve as a scalable survival mechanism for Venezuelan refugees. By necessity, this process will become cheaper and simpler than its current industrial application, and therefore, you can choose to start by hiring local food manufacturers. 

Online training gives very little support to your students. In a population with many members with little education and marginalized, the effectiveness of this platform is very limited. Therefore, we are developing novel content that will be delivered in a hybrid online / in person program with broad support from committed trainers. In addition, most online and in-person training programs for such populations simply enable them to do low-level work and, in doing so, severely limit their creativity and perception of boundaries.

Most importantly, we are implementing many functions and seeking partnerships to ensure the success of this program in meeting its objectives. For example, our goal is to create an online space for new companies that arise from this program to present their ideas to potential investors on a regular basis. In addition, the cinematographic component of this program will have advertising space for new companies that arise from the program. 

In summary, the promise of online training with respect to upward mobility and democratic education is severely limited by the lack of a comprehensive and sustainable approach to help needy populations. In addition, educating a large number of people requires constant contact, culturally adapted content and reinvention, which online training programs do not currently pursue. 

People fleeing political turmoil often end up in a place where they are seen as a burden or annoyance. This causes cultural tension and deprivation of rights, resulting in lack of access to food, medicine and shelter, with the final effect of cutting off access to any mechanism that can be used for upward mobility. Therefore, there are cultural, educational, political and economic barriers to the success of displaced populations, and no organization tries to address all these imbalances through a comprehensive and innovative training program.

We are in the development stage of the concept. Within a year, our goal is to train 500 Colombians and 500 Venezuelans in Bucaramanga, Colombia. Within five years, we hope to reach 20,000 people in South America and around the world. Of these populations, we expect 60% to end up with successful startups. To improve the paths to success, we hope to grant a subsidy to successful new companies to hire workers to carry out the program, especially those whose new companies end up failing. 

In the next year, we hope to partner with cultural, educational and industry leaders to produce the content of the course that best meets the objectives of this program. We will also partner with an online training platform to organize the online component of this course. In this sense, we have already negotiated partnerships with local universities to host the components in person. At the end of a year, our goal is to begin our first iteration of the training program with 500 Colombians and 500 Venezuelans. 

Within five years, we hope to collect data on the successes and failures of our program to make improvements, as well as strive to better understand the problems we are trying to solve. To this end, we hope to create personalized programs, based on the mechanism of empathic growth, for the most controversial border areas of the world and the sociocultural and tumultuous cities.

The Ministry of Education of Colombia is very strict regarding which curricula are taught and the institutions that will allow granting certifications. Without an educational certificate, the only hope for the upward mobility of Venezuela will be these new companies, since they will not be able to obtain good jobs. 

With respect to culture, Colombian citizens perceive Venezuelans as badly educated, without education and as a burden. Getting the two populations involved significantly in the training and development of a startup will be a major problem. 

In the long term, ensuring the continued success of Venezuelans in the culture and economy of Colombia will be a great challenge. 

For the study plans, we will work with MIT and other US institutions to ensure the Colombian certification of the content of our program. 

With respect to culture, we will develop empathy components of the training program to generate mutual understanding and camaraderie between the two populations. 

To address long-term cultural and economic problems, we hope to provide avenues and reciprocity among the successful companies that emerge from the program, so that those who do not succeed can do meaningful and rewarding work, rather than domestic work. 

Al aire libre

Currently, there are six part-time staff members on our team. Our goal is to hire 50 online trainers and 50 in-person trainers to facilitate our program implementation process.

We are a multidisciplinary team across USA and Colombia. Currently, our leader is Josh Van Zac from Harvard where he is a professor assistance interested in bioprinting, and Matt Murrie from Belouga platform who were working on global collaboration and innovation. Other staff members from Colombia at UIS are the following students: Jackson Serrano and Maria Paula Flórez are industrial engineering students keen on entrepreneurship and innovation capabilities. Duvan Fonseca and Sully Calderón are industrial design students who work in the development of medical devices with low resources. And Israel Garnica is and industrial designer, master student in industrial engineering, and lecturer at industrial design school. We have worked together to deeply understand the cultural and economic problems faced by Venezuelans in Colombia, as well as those faced by Colombian graduates, in order to develop a comprehensive curriculum to address many related aspects of these programs, with a Prospective approach.

We are currently developing a partnered with MIT and UIS to develop curricula and recruit instructors for this program. We are also looking talk space with the Ministry of Education and the local government of Bucaramanga to identify locations for training and financing opportunities for new start-ups.

The purpose of our program is to teach technologically advanced survival skills that can be made cheaper and more specific for a given population, and in doing so, be leveraged to start a business. Once a start-up is initiated, we provide digital and physical spaces in which students will regularly present their ideas to industry leaders, venture capitalists, and grant-making organizations.

To support the founding and success of startups that emerge from our entrepreneurship program, we will operate as a hybrid educational-venture capital-humanitarian business, or simply a venture capital incubator. We believe this for-profit model to be one that can spur exponential growth at a fast rate, as opposed to a nonprofit model, which is limited by grant funding and small salaries. This will not only allow us to hire top-talent to ensure the success and protection of these companies, but also enable us to hire Colombians and Venezuelans to engender a vested interest in the future economic and cultural development of their shared home.

We will partner with universities, organizations, governments and companies to subsidize specific aspects of our program, as well as provide funds for trainers and curriculum developers. We will document the process of obtaining such funding so that the people who participate in the business development component of our program learn from our experience.

We will provide initial capital to select startups in exchange for 20% participatory ownership of the company as well as a seat on the Board of Directors. As such, we will be able to implement and oversee protective provisions in order to guide and safeguard inexperienced founders. To recoup investments, we will take a 1x, 2x, or 5x return, depending on the success of the company. Once we've paid back our limited partners, we will funnel any remaining revenue back into a common pool for newer startups. 

Ultimately, we plan to operate a hybrid venture capital incubator model with the goal of solving social issues, not creating enormous profits. Our reasoning is that functioning like a venture capital firm will allow us to grow quickly and sustainably as an organization, so that we can use our capital and resources to spark as much socioeconomic growth as possible.  

We would like to partner with IDB Bank, who is already funding educational efforts for indigenous and disenfranchised populations in South America, to fund a majority of the educational component of our program with investment capital. 

To give startups initial funding and access to potential investors, we will partner with the Ministry of Education and Ministry of Business in Colombia, local business, MIT, the Universidad Industrial de Santander, the Economic Development Corporation in Bucaramanga.

We will also initiate contracts with local movie theaters, social media networks, filmmakers, artists, businesses, museums, and online media platforms such as Netflix and Hulu to host, fund, and distribute the art projects that come out of the third stage of our program. 

We will develop a curriculum to spark passions for leadership, empathy, and responsible business development, and partner with an online education platform to host the online component of this program. We will also provide small stipends for our existing part-time workers, who are currently volunteering. 

The point of our solution is to reframe Venezuelan migration into Colombia as an opportunity to drive empathic socioeconomic growth, rather than a burden. By engaging both Venezuelans and Colombians in a training program to learn and commercialize technologically advanced survival skills, we aspire to spark a dynamic and sustainable startup culture in Bucaramanga that becomes a case study for and can be replicated in our planet's most contentious areas.