Laboratorio de Innovacion

How many people would you hire if you would like to help Entrepreneurs, Companies, Ministries, City representatives and teachers to learn innovation methodologies, to applicate them in their business, to prototype and to test their ideas so that they can increase the positive impact of their actions? Let say 50? You would be far from the number of people who work at the Laboratorio de Inovación to achieve those goals: only 16!

The average age is 30 and while they all have very innovative ideas, they always talk about « us ». This « us » has more than one string to its bow. He is an architect, engineer, designer, and journalist. The spirit: Be entrepreneur – apply, test and learn methodology - no yearly objective – no chief but coordinators – a Flexible organization of the time schedule. It sounds like « liberation management » without naming it at no time.

Like the areas the lab is dedicated to, the team is split to focus on each activity:

• 8 are working for the Company&Entrepreneur department. José Willington coordinates them to teach innovation, prototype ideas and helps the wave of 15-20 entrepreneurs and companies to call their business into question during 1 month and a half. Depending on their availability, they are free to come to the lab as much as they want.

• 3 are dedicated to helping teachers to describe their needs by the mean of innovation methodology such as design thinking. Sessions occur during 12 weeks split into 4 sprints during which companies and entrepreneurs are progressively involved in creating&testing solutions and foundations to finance them. This activity is coordinated by Alejandro Roldán.

• 4 are focused on teaching innovation and supporting representatives of Medellin’s municipalities through the « communa inova » program. The idea is to reconcile citizens with government by converting a greater number of citizen needs and increasing the previous needs/solutions ratio that was 5000/10. The team coordinated by Juan Diego organize 7 sessions to make needs emerge from public entities and to refine them. Then, they are posted on memedellin.com so that citizens can vote for what they think to be more critical. The emerging needs are released on the Ruta N and sunn website to ask for solutions from other cities, companies, and entrepreneurs. Finally, they are prototyped and tested with the help of the team.

• 1 is working on the administrative & communication stuff and also maintains machines.

According to the team lab, their objective is feeling useless. They will succeed in introducing innovation spirit in business, education and public sectors when they do it on their own.

Also, one of their big challenges is how to go from the prototypes to the final products and the company creations.

An anthill. That what looks like the Laboratorio de Inovación. Besides the team, you could bump into an entrepreneur, a collaborator of an international company, a teacher and a representative of a Medellin’s municipality.

The first main motivation of the users to come to the lab is the support given by the team about innovation and the adapted format depending on each sector.

Thus, between 15 and 20 companies and entrepreneurs are supported during a 1 month and a half program to call into questions their product and fine-tune the solution depending on the targeted impact. Example: Format singular project.

A few hundreds of teachers from Medellin’s school&universities come for a 4-month program during which they learn new teaching methodologies like STEM, learning by doing and gamification. They are also sensitized to digital fabrication tools to use them as pedagogic tools.

And fifties secretaries from Medellin’s municipalities learn during a 4 months innovation methodologies program thanks to online certificate training courses. In parallel, they are helped by the team to formulate citizens problems that will be released on Internet to allow citizens to vote to the one they judge more urgent. As an example, the first 2018 session gave birth to an awareness campaign about the sexual harassment based on the invisible theatre and statistical tools to measure the risk of minors being involved in the commission of crimes.

Then, they also come to the place and access to the machine to prototype solutions. Even after the programs ended, they are free to come.

And, finally, they all are attracted by the great network of the lab as a public entity supported by the government and its ability to gather in one place all kind of people making a small ecosystem. At the end of their program, entrepreneurs are connected to public actors to test their solutions. Teachers are connected with entrepreneurs to create teaching solutions and with foundations to finance them. And secretaries of Medellin’s municipalities are connected to other international cities, companies, and entrepreneurs to develop solutions to citizens problems.

As a public corporation, the Laboratorio of Innovacion benefits from public fundings with the intermediary of Ruta N. Each year, they build their business plan where the budget is defined according to their objectives of the year. This plan is reviewed and validated by Ruta N to aline and optimize it with the all organization strategy and budget. Ressources are dealt apart: the team members are hired for a limited period of time by the Human resources of Ruta N depending on the need of each branch (education, business, government). Ruta N is also in charge of monitoring the budget all year long and to report the results to government entities.

The Laboratorio is autonomous to run the daily operational activities but all major decisions are made with the director of the Innovacion programs of Ruta N. If they don’t have to deal with the incomes, they have to report about their activity. First about the budget consumption, then about their results based on key indicators. These indicators are either specific to each type of users (education, business, government) but also general to be merged with the other entities of Ruta N in an annual report accessible online.

Their main partners are the organizations part of Ruta N network such as el laboratorio vivo, a living lab specialized in the user-centric approach of design, the start-up’s ecosystem supported by Ruta N or sunn, a digital community to connect investors, users, and providers.