Study of Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation Ecosystems in the Latin American Pacific Alliance Countries: Regional Analysis: Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico & Peru

Date
Jul 2016
This report sets out to present some of the highlights from a more in depth study carried out on social entrepreneurship and innovation ecosystems in Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico and Peru as part of a wider comparative study between the Latin American Pacific Alliance countries and sixcountries in Asia (Japan, South Korea, China, Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines). This study comprises a global, regional and country level perspectives as well as a detailed analysis of 25 examples of social enterprise within the two regions. In this report we begin by providing the context of the Pacific Alliance agenda and observe the opportunity this regional integration effort may have for social enterprise across the region. Secondly we outline some of the different ways each countries ecosystem has evolved over the last few years in terms of public policies, intermediaries, financial support mechanisms and Universities. There are different stages of evolution to be observed depending on the sector. For
example Chile and Colombia have followed similar processes to develop public policies for social innovation (building on the maturity of their existing entrepreneurship and innovation support systems), whereas Costa Rica has leap-frogged this process with the creation of its new Social Innovation Council. Mexico and Colombia are leading the way in terms of social impact investment and Peru, with a far more incipient ecosystem although has seen rapid growth in the last two years, which above all has stimulated social entrepreneurship activity within the University sector. Thirdly we consider the different degrees of social and financial motivations of social enterprises
and how these are made to fit within the existing legal frameworks and also explore the profile of the social entrepreneur in the region. Finally observe the emerging phenomena of social innovation labs as new ways of responding to social problems using diverse systemic perspectives, new ways of experimentation and learning and unique participatory design approaches.