The 5th edition of Santalucía Impulsa Empleados, the company's entrepreneurship program, kicks off

Last month of January Santalucía Impulsa, the Santalucía Group's entrepreneurship and Open Innovation ecosystem, launched the 5th edition of its entrepreneurship program: Santalucía Impulsa Empleados. We'll tell you what the beginning was like!

New edition of the Santalucía Impulsa entrepreneurship program

The last edition of Santalucía Impulsa Empleados was a success thanks to the projects that reached the final: Reconquering Home and Next Generation. Both turned out to be fully functional products that solved real and existing needs in the market. A year later, there are 24 entrepreneurs who, divided by teams, will face the challenges proposed to them over the next few months: HOME challenge, ALLIANCES challenge, FINANCE challenge and DEATH challenge.Each of the teams, accompanied at all times by innovation mentors and business mentors, will face one of the challenges posed. To do this, they will have to develop a value proposition, design a business model, build a viable prototype of the solution and validate the real fit between the existing problem and the solution developed. During the first session, the participants learned in depth about the operation of the program. But they also discovered what challenges they would have to face this year and, of course, who would be their companions and mentors in this process. From there, the journey began!

First training of Santalucía Impulsa Employees: UNDERSTAND

Training sessions and work both as a team and with mentors are essential for each group to carry out their project. So, with this first training given on February 1st, it was time to get to work.Lucho Dominguez, Design Researcher for Innovation, was responsible for teaching the entrepreneurs of this 5th edition the first steps to start a project. This module dealt with the importance of understanding and the very process of understanding.

What is the process of understanding?

1. Define the segment: The path to success is to begin by defining a small and well-defined group of people who share a common problem or need. It is, therefore, a matter of segmenting the market and selecting a context. It is important to clarify whether it is a B2B, B2C or B2B2C, since each of them needs different resources and strategies.
2. Designing primary research: the next step is to define the objectives and specify what you want or need to learn. To do this, you can create an interview guide that includes its structure and the most important questions.
3. Talk to users: leaving the workplace and talking to real people and potential clients is the most effective solution.
4. Generate insights: Insight is that knowledge that was not obvious before talking to users. To arrive at it, it is important to group the interview data into groups of patterns that are repeated and analyzed to arrive at the solution.
5. Define the point of view and reframe the challenge: Once the previous steps have been completed, it's time to make a decision. It's important to focus on an insight that serves as a guide to creating the solution that will help potential customers get rid of their problem or achieve the desired benefits.

Second training of Santalucía Impulsa Employees: DIVERGIR

After the first module on the importance of understanding, the second training and work session of this new edition of the entrepreneur program took place.Irati Lekue, who has been accompanying teams in their transformation for more than 8 years, leading strategic facilitation and innovation processes, trained business owners in the concept of diverge. Throughout the day, they worked on ideation, analyzed trends to find initiatives related to their challenges, researched the competition to find companies that offered solutions focused on the same problem or area of opportunity and, finally, they understood the strategy of Blue Ocean Strategy.

In addition to applying all these processes to their own challenges, all participants worked as a team to find and provide new approaches or points of view that would shed some light on their future projects.

This has only just begun!