An entrepreneur’s access to growth capital, knowledge networks, and local experts and mentors can make or break their journey to success. These factors all contribute towards creating an enabling environment for entrepreneurship, as do inspiring role models, spaces for prototyping and manufacturing, and support between peers.
Together, these elements form a kind of innovation ecosystem which can be bolstered via targeted local activities. Through our Leaders in Innovation Fellowships, we have supported our alumni community to design and deliver national and regional community-building projects with the aim of strengthening networks and furthering entrepreneurial development. Through small grants of £5,000, our 16 awardees, or LIF champions, delivered their projects in 10 countries between October 2020 and March 2021.
Our LIF champions are entrepreneurial leaders. Through their projects, they have developed their local innovation ecosystems, motivated and engaged their peers to collaborate and support one another, and generated new opportunities to raise the profile of LIF alumni and further their commercialisation journeys. For this blog post, we spoke to Magarita from the Mexican Digital LIF Community team about their project, which has helped to launch an annual conference focused on the development of digital-based technologies. The conference reached over 2,400 people and engaged 15 partners across the innovation ecosystem in Latin America to help promote LIF alumni innovations. Margarita says:"The impact of this project is much bigger than we expected. We are so thankful we were able to involve several technology universities in the congress and key stakeholders in the ecosystem. Plus, because we had to run some of these activities virtually, through the likes of Facebook Live transmissions, we were able to share sessions without a restriction on the number of participants."
Through their projects, LIF champions are strengthening communities of innovators to drive change and support innovation networks at a local and global level. Ahmet from the One LIFe team shares how leveraging collective influence to help inform policy and engage key stakeholders can effect change in a local ecosystem: “By engaging with local incubators and policy makers as one LIF network with many members, we are hoping to get our members’ needs and feedback taken more seriously and addressed in a timely way to benefit the whole local entrepreneur ecosystem.”
There is power in community. Through partnering with universities, incubators and other startups, LIF alumni and other entrepreneurs are accessing new local spaces to continue their innovation and venture development while learning from the knowledge and expertise of others. Now, with a new cohort of LIF champions the ambition is even higher. The Academy has supported 14 more projects which will be delivered between May and September 2021. Taking on lessons learnt from the pilot projects, LIF champions are choosing to either maximise the impact of work done in the first round of community grants; design new projects in response to gaps they have identified such as prototyping and production techniques or sectorial focused forums; or collaborate with alumni from other countries to deliver international projects that help to improve access to new markets, share sectorial learnings or leverage international investment opportunities.
Through the art of community-building, LIF champions are making the entrepreneurial journey less lonely. They are improving knowledge sharing, peer support and access to mentors, spaces, and finance. Together, they are strengthening innovation ecosystems around the world, and creating opportunities for entrepreneurs to further their impact and develop the social and economic welfare of their communities.