Endeavor, una incubadora de empresas en países en desarrollo

Endeavor is a non-profit group based in New York dedicated to promoting entrepreneurship in emerging economies. Fresh from Yale, she was working in Buenos Aires for Ashoka, an organisation that supports social entrepreneurs—people with innovative, usually non-profit ideas for solving social problems—and concluded that ordinary entrepreneurs needed a similar support system.

Endeavor’s magic works most powerfully in its selection process. Entrepreneurs are screened first by a national panel of successful businessmen, and then, if they are short-listed, by an international panel. So far over 18,000 entrepreneurs have been screened but fewer than 400 have been chosen. The aim is to identify those who can succeed on a scale that will make them into national role models, and then provide them with every possible support. But the process is designed to benefit all entrants, by helping them define their visions more clearly.

Endeavor’s entrepreneurs—who collectively now control companies with combined revenues of $2.4 billion and 91,000 employees, earning on average ten times the minimum wage in their country—rarely say they would not have succeeded without Endeavor.

Funding has long been a problem for Endeavor. As a non-profit, it has to rely on donors—many recruited through a glitzy annual gala in New York. Happily, Endeavor has high hopes of moving onto a stronger financial footing. In some countries where it operates, starting with Brazil, successful entrepreneurs are signing up to a “give back” programme, donating 2% of their equity to Endeavor. With luck this could soon make the national operations self-sustaining.

Via | Economist

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