Our Big Hairy Audacious Goal

Our big hairy audacious goal or BHAG (to steal a line from business guru Jim Collins) is to travel to 7 South American Countries in 7 Months and to interview 100 entrepreneurs and write about them in our book and blog! 

Why?

Entrepreneurship has a magical ring to it – it speaks of innovation, progress, prosperity and risk. And for that reason, it is perhaps the greatest change agent our society knows. While entrepreneurship might be synonymous with the good old U.S. of A, it’s flourishing abroad – especially in South America and could seriously change the way we see what it means to be an entrepreneur.

For example, in Chile, 2012 was named “The year of entrepreneurship in Chile, and 2013, “the year of innovation”. The Global Entrepreneurship monitor named Bolivia as having one of the highest entrepreneurship potential in the world in 2008 and Colombia was recently named by Fortune Magazine as being one of the top emerging countries to watch for. 

In the book Reverse Innovation; Dartmouth professor, Vijay Govindarajan explores the concept of innovating in the developing world and bringing it to developed countries. The result? Creative innovations that aren’t hemmed in by traditional “Developed world” thought, and super cost effective products and services.

What if we brought developing world entrepreneurship to the U.S.? Could it change the way we do business? Or the way we see what it means to be an entrepreneur? By gathering the stories of South American entrepreneurs, we deem to do just that: discover what it means to be an entrepreneur in the developing world and translate that to America. It’s reverse innovation… for entrepreneurs.