Octantis Overview
Octantis is a business accelerator founded in 2003 by three partners: Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, a prestigious business school in Chile, Invertec IGT, a firm specialized in innovation consulting and Clima de Emprendimiento Organizado (Organized Entrepreneurial Climate) an entrepreneurial network of ITC and biotechnology entrepreneurs. Octantis applies a networking approach for supporting high growth potential innovative companies. Octantis is concentrated on adding value for the creation of dynamic companies; facilitating contacts, along with business formation and coaching in each phase of the generation of new companies and start-ups. The Octantis business model is to take option-over-equity participation into the supported companies.
Since the beginning of 2003, Octantis has generated a deal flow of over 3000 business ideas, and supported over 250 new initiatives from different industries. The aggregate sales of the companies supported by Octantis had US$ 10 million in revenues for 2006. They currently have 86 projects/companies in our portfolio and 12 international patents in process. With the Infodev support, Octantis created the first angel investors network (currently Southern Angels, an autonomous operation) which raise over US$1 million for innovative companies. Octantis raised another US$1 million in funds from government programs for innovative companies (INNOVA - CORFO).
Mr. Aldo Aspilcueta, International Program Manager of Octantis, started a blogspot in 2006 in order to gather and share experiences of entrepreneurs that would be useful to publish for a broader audience. His blogspot can be read (in Spanish) at realpreneurship.blogspot.com.
What was underlying reason for starting this blogspot?
I have worked with entrepreneurs for 4 years and find that being able to share experiences with collegues as well other entrepreneurs is an important stepping stone to success in helping entrepreneurs. This blogspot is more of a hobby for me, and tries to capture some experiences I have seen (as this is a personal initiative, the content may not necessarily is in coincidence with official company point of view). Also, I wanted to create a space where these experiences – both the bad and the good ones – are anonymous, so that an entrepreneur would be more inclined to tell me even when something in his business has gone wrong or failed. In the entrepreneurial culture in Chile, you do not want to publicize that you may have failed, although usually entrepreneurs will have to go through some failures in order to know how to properly succeed with the next business. I usually write on my blogspot after office working hours, when I remember something that I have encountered with an entrepreneur – there would be many more experiences to share, if only there would be enough time to write them all!
My former colleague at Octantis, Eduardo Reyes, has in fact also started a blog to share these experiences and methodologies. You can check his site at www.emprenet.cl. You can see that this is a hot topic for many of the people in our incubator!
What are some the experiences that you have often heard of and that are common to the entrepreneurial climate in Chile?
The overall challenge in Chile is being able to bring people together – networking. We have a very fragmented society both physically and socially, not only because we have long physical distances but because the social connections: we have a large divide between the wealthier and less well off people. There is seldom even an opportunity for entrepreneurs and potential investors to meet in this regard. So what Octantis is trying to do is build the bridges for these gaps, and we are really focusing a lot on networking and bringing businesses and buyers together. In a sense we are helping to buildg bridges between these different worlds (entrepreneurs and investors, innovators and corporations, researchers and business people).
Another issue that comes from this networking “problem umbrella” is that when people are then brought together, they have difficulties with teamwork. In Chile, according to some recent statistics, we have the most distrustful population in the region at least. This means that we are very careful and reluctant to partner with people unless we have known them for a long time – in fact, this is something that Fukuyama has characterized as “social capital distrust”. So although we might not have a problem with the product or the technology itself, we have a problem with the people behind these products, and hence there is an inbuilt challenge in trying to cooperate to succeed. In fact I like to compare this to something like dating – it takes a long time before we feel like we are able to trust the other person until we enter into a long-term partnership! But when it comes to business, we should of course be able to look at these team working issues in a business-oriented light and take some “professional distance” from the partners we are working with.
The third issue that comes from the overall networking challenge is the challenge in the Chilean ecosystem for entrepreneurship. Although Chile has a unique advantage in terms of other countries in the region, because there is a strong commitment in government and business community to support and financing entrepreneurship and innovation. Anyway, it is usual that the efforts are too focused on the financing issue only. We should be talking about the multitude of issues involved in creating a good business environment, and also pay attention to coaching for legal issues, marketing and media, and so on. We should really be talking about the whole context for doing business, and not only the financing aspect of starting one up – although this is of course a crucial issue in itself as well. It is necessary to take a ecosystem oriented point of view.
And a more detailed problem that we have here in Chile, specially for internationalization of companies, is the lack of language skills. Only about 5 – 10% of our population speaks English, and this really limits our potential to work with people from outside the country, and also to even understand the knowledgebase that exists in another language. Hopefully this will change with the next generation at least, that now knows the importance of the English language and have the opportunity to travel more than before. This is nonetheless an issue for the current entrepreneurial population.
In addition to spreading this “know-how” on your blogspot, you are also trying to establish a network for “know-who” – could you please tell us more about this?
Well in my experience I think that the strongest potential for success come from linking the people with the people, and channeling both into business action. Again in terms of the networking challenge I was describing earlier, this know-who idea is trying to counter that. So what I have done is created a profile in LinkedIn [www.linkedin.com] and I now have over 80 connections there both in Chile and all over the world. This is not only a personal initiative: most of octantis staff has joined this network that gives us informal conection with 360.000 connections around the world. We do believe in the six degrees theory: we are already connected with any person in the world through a chain of 6 people maximum (a friend who knows a friend who knows a friend, etc).
I have found this to be a very useful tool for me in terms of sharing experiences between the people who are located in different countries that I might not have a chance to visit – but I can connect with them through this system. Also, it is a way to try to find some of the upcoming and innovative companies that we might want to have in incubators to help them develop their promising business ideas further.
In addition to the actual connections and potential of such a networking system, it is also a way to help Chilean entrepreneurs “open their mind” to experiences abroad and to learn from these. For example, one day we organiced a phone/skype conference between a chilean entrepreneur with a similar entrepreneur who was located in Sweden, which is very far from Chile, but whose experiences I was able to “take home” with this kind of know-who and networking. infoDev is also planning on setting up this type of interactive directory for the incubators in its Global Network Directory on iDISC [www.idisc.net] so I very much look forward to what kind of connections and virtual discussions this will give to us.
What kind of future do you see for these networking activities that you have at Octantis and also in your hobby blogspot?
Well right now we are establishing a stronger framework for our networking activities, and we have actually made some more partnerships in the recent months. For example, we are developing a partnership with the Parque Tec Incubator in Costa Rica just recently and hopefully that will enable us to share more experiences and overall help companies from across the borders success. We are also going to organize a networking event in Miami (where our main partner, Universidad Adolfo Ibanez has an important operation) soon, which is supported by the Miami Chamber of Commerce, and we hope to get more partnerships from this as well. With these, and other international connections (we are developing collaboration initiatives with incubators in Australia and San Francisco, California), it also very interesting to be able to look at the differences that regions have both between and among themselves.
Also I would like to add that what we are working on now for Octantis a new website, an improved Web 2.0 version compared to what we have now. The new developments also concentrate on making the site interactive to promote networking, for example our entrepreneurs will be able to update their own profiles there. Hopefully this will lead some more discussions and sharing the useful experiences and business opportunities among entrepreneurs in Chile!
For more information about Octantis check their profile on the Global Network Directory.