Regional Conference on Innovation and Entrepreneurship for Latin America and the Caribbean: Conference Program [pdf, 196 KB]

LAC Regional Conference: Inauguration Speech by Valerie D’Costa [pdf, 41 KB]

The conference gathered more than 150 incubator and technology park managers, business development professionals and organization from countries including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, France, Grenada, Jamaica, Mexico, Panama, Peru, the Dominican Republic, St. Vincent, Uruguay, and the United States.

Throughout the conference and again underlined in its closing remarks, the conference as an single event - and the network behind it - were seen to have the nature and value of creating opportunities. Sharing knowledge and best practices among incubator and technology park managers and business development professionals portrayed that there is no one model for incubation, and highlighted the importance and existence of a multitude of support mechanims that can help entrepreneurs in their varying business environments. infoDev's support was seen as critical to identifiying regional and global needs and to provide the general plaform for global incubation activities. Nonetheless, the conference called for generating stronger links to and among entrepreneurs, and for leveraging the conference to incubators' clients in addition to incubators themselves. Furthermore, the relevance and presence of private sector support was also seen as an area for further development.

In the LAC region in particular, strengthening the State institutions, and hence national regulatory environments, is critical for a better support structure for innovation and entrepreneurship. The presence of the Minister of Finance of Chile, and several other active public sector representatives was encouraging. Long-term investment in incubation was seen as a vital issue in order to promote broader national and regional Knowledge Economy goals.

Sharing best practices and experiences among incubator and technology park managers at the conference was seen as the very essence and "vitality" of the network, and brought together a common language among the different incubation models. Human capital and skills are central components of the success of the network, and the tool that business incubation opportunities as well as challenges are tackled with. The conference met current incubation needs on both the individual and network level. These needs were channeled into a hands-on workshop session on the future strategy of the LAC network, which gives impetus to the the work of Mr. Pablo Angelelli who will in the near future draw up a regional strategy for the LAC network. This upcoming strategy will be published here as soon as it is available.

As a bottom line to the conference, business incubation was seen as a significant part of reaching broader goals of national and regional economic growth, where incubators themselves have an important role in generating innovative national policies.