Social Sabbatical at SEED in Belo Horizonte, Brazil
The Startups and Entrepreneurship Ecosystem Development (SEED) is an international acceleration program for start-ups and entrepreneurs who want to develop their businesses in Minas Gerais. SEED is the only accelerator with public resources in Brazil aimed at strengthening the interaction, network, abilities and knowledge transfer between the supported entrepreneurs and the local entrepreneurial environment. These activities aim to help the region Minas Gerais to transform from a commodity driven industry to a region of technology innovation and entrepreneurship.
We have the pleasure to work as a team with Sophia (SAP China), Peter (SAP Singapore) and myself (SAP Switzerland) with the great people at SEED for four weeks on a methodology, that should proof the larger economical and social impact of their acceleration activities. After 1.5 wks in this project, we thought it is time for a short report.
The first and foremost thing we learned here from the first day is that this region is full of fantastic people, with great ideas, passion and a very warm welcome for us. Every single minute working in this environment has been a pleasure for us. We are really feeling honored, that we can contribute our professional experience to this project to have a joint success.
In the first 1.5 weeks we have been talking to many people from SEED, partner organizations, government, business, startups and education — and collected more than 9000 words of notes. But in a nutshell there was one element in common in all these interviews: This region Minas Gerais really takes their transformations journey serious and started literally hundreds of different activities and engagements to foster the innovation and Entrepreneurship. It is amazing to see that people, that have not yet even brought their own startup across the chasm, are already heavily engaged in helping the others to get better and not trap into the same pitfalls they have hit. The people are so full of ideas, that many Entrepreneurs have more than one startup and are already planning for more.
Coming from a multinational company like SAP, it is amazing to see the enthusiasm, dedication and believe these people have. It reminds us, that also our company started back in 1972 as an idea of 5 people.
As we are here as part of our social sabbatical, we are surprised how many of these startups see social impact activities as an essential element of their business right from the start. They have understood, that only if they take care about their environment and the social and economical development of the region they are working in, they will be able to establish a sustainable business. With out that, they would drain the market they would like to grow in.
We see of course as well the challenges this country suffers from, like missing infrastructure, poverty, missing quality of education, political changes and a very complex bureaucracy. Obviously these circumstances we cannot change in our 4 weeks down here in Brazil, nor can the people living here in Brazil. Looking at this, it is even more impressive that this does not kill the motivation of the people living here to work around these complications and start to change them step by step. We have seen already in this short term many initiatives where startups are helping eachother to get around this.
Needless to say that next to these professional experiences in our daily work we enjoy every day here the friendliness and openness of the people we meet, how grateful they are that we are here and the remarkable food of the region Minas Gerais.
Stay tuned for further updates on the progress of our project.
Sophia, Peter and Uwe
