With the fusion of the “Science and technologic park” and the “Entrepreneur and Innovation department” in 2017 was build a complementary and efficient team made up of 6 officials :

• Andres Jose Cueva Costales, director of the new “Science, technologic and innovation park”
• Edgar Eduardo Cartegena Ocampo, the fabmanager and Jose Gerardo Acosta Arias, 2 “super makers”, respectively electronic and mechanical engineers, trained by the Fabacademy, who support users from the design to the production of prototypes and technological investigations
• Jonathan David Sanchez Aguilar and Pamela Carolina Camacho, the second duo who guide users from the idea until a viable business creation with their innovation methodologies, their marketing and business model competencies and their real business experience,
• Rosa Mercedez Gonzaga Noguera, in charge of the administrative tasks and specialized in web and mobile development to help users in the digital part of their projects.

Even if they have dedicated roles, they work in very close interaction to support each other in their daily activities. In fact, they are linked by the shared values of collaboration but also accessibility, ethics, social responsibility and innovation to empower Ecuadorian in order to reduce the breach of knowledge and change their spirit from consumers to responsible producers. They share the same philosophy based on 2 pillars: “Do it your self” and “How to make almost anything”.

Their main activities are to design and perform workshops for students and to guide entrepreneurs from their idea to the search of investors. The team is completed by 2 students, Adolpho y Valverde, of the Unidad Educativa school, who discover the magic of digital fabrication during courses performed by the team. They are now coming almost every day to practice and increase their knowledge. In exchange, these young makers are helping the team as instructors during courses performed for kids.

When you come to Fablab Yachay, you are looking for high technology machines but also for the Yachay ecosystem which provides you all the services required to perform an innovative project: a super computer for AI or Big data, a team to guide you in the innovation/design/production process, biological and agricultural knowledge, high precision 3D scanner, 3D printer and CNC to perform retro-engineering, … This city of knowledge is opened to everyone but before coming, the team advised you to fill in the contact form in the website to be guided to the appropriate space and team depending on your need.

You may imagine that this kind of place may be crowded every day. Unfortunately, because of its remote location, the biggest challenge for the team is to attract people. Even if they try to work with craftmen or companies, the main users are the students (300 each semester) or entrepreneurs (50 each semester). To raise awareness, they organize local and international events such as “start-up weekends”, hackathons, bootcamps and to retain users, they developed dedicated programs and workshops.

For students, they designed free meet-ups of 2 hours where they learn new skills by making a solution or a project linked to an academic course. They also offer free social programs to train kids during holidays or to teach mechatronics and innovation to students of the UEMY elementary school. For entrepreneurs, they open a “call for proposal” on subjects such as AgroTech. The selected teams can either have 4 free months (with the Telefonica Open Future challenge) or a chargeable year (with Yachay incubation program PIEBT) to benefit from support and access to the infrastructures. Among them, 30% are users of the Fablab.

Their partnerships with universities and companies are essential to open these programs and they are also involved in government alliance such as the innovation hub of North Ecuador to support local business (such as can sugar company) to suggest ideas of development. The maker network of Ecuador is also valuable: it exists a great solidarity among them to provide to each other quick operational solutions.

To come out and to train people to digital fabrication, the lab has been helped by international and national companies.

Schlumberger played a major role in the launch of the lab. It financed machines and materials with the support of the fabfoundation to select them and settle the place. Also, it supported the training of 4 fabmanagers by granting Fab Academy scholarships. The 300 000$ invested is the main financial help received. Besides, Savain helped for operational maintenance of the whole park of machines twice a year, Bosh gave sensors and Edimca y aglomerados cotopaxi provided wood materials. The counterpart asked by some of them was to give a feedback of those materials to improve it.

To assume the operational costs of 2000$/month, which are mainly human resources, the lab sells three kinds of services :

• First, it rents the use of the machines (Impression 3D 10$/h, Laser cutter 30$/h, CNC router 25$/h, tax not included)
• Then it offers innovation tours of 10$/person during which the team explain innovation concepts, do a lab tour and a conference about a specific topic on which the public company Yachay is working like agriculture tech. And it also includes the launch!
• Finally, it gives advisory missions to entrepreneurs and companies. The first step is to assess the needs, then to give innovation advisory and finally to measure the impact of the innovation generation.

But, the lab is not yet sustainable as it generated 15 000$ in 2017.

In link with the advisory activity, the lab has created an indicator to capture the percentage of companies who have had an impact amongst the ones that have followed an advisory session. It exists a vast number of impact measures like the access to a new market, the increase of the diversity of good and services and the reduction of the environmental footprint. If you are looking for more impact measures, don’t hesitate to contact the lab!