As much as I like the initiative, I am not sure if I like the structure. Governments are feeders, they cannot be leaders in efforts like this. I think the leadership for such initiatives need to come from
Entrepreneurs. I like grass root movement that brings together different stakeholders who have their own sustainability mechanisms that contribute and enable the ecosystem. I don’t believe forced innovation and entrepreneurship works. It has to be self motivated just like people. Because when one thinks about
Ecosystem, it comprises of a group of people coming together from different background but focused on a single goal. I remember, my Economic
PhD qualification examination at LSU. The exam had one question (the exact wordings are not accurate): “You have been asked to testify in front of congress on social benefits of individuals pursuing their own happiness, prove why this leads to better good”. I proved this through an
non-linear optimization problem using
Utility maximization of individual agents in a society that leads to more optimal maximum for the whole society than if the optimization was done through a single agent i.e Government, Central planner etc. It was beautiful mathematics, loved working on that… but what I find fascinating is how that has influenced how I think. Don’t get me wrong, I think central planning, Government and initiatives like the one above are important and necessary drivers but not sufficient to enable a sustainable startup ecosystem. I believe every stakeholder needs to have the right incentives and Goals, remember goals have to be SMART – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely. The goals of the program seem a little skewed for my taste, does having a greater number of companies bootstrap from Chile improve innovation in Chile? Not sure that is obvious. I have more questions than answers about programs like this. I like simple Accelerators like
TechStars or
Y-Combinator, there is an economic engine… but it needs a push out of the door, which is what I have been proposing we do in Iceland.
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Now I am really confused, are you saying that I am confused? about what exactly?
An interesting application of optimization, I’m always fascinated by seeing the math theories at work.
Continuing the theory, what do you think about this: there are many algorithms for finding the global maximum. However, I guess people will tend to more often use the more obvious ones, like the gradient descent. The later often leads to reaching only local maximums. There, you can’t know, are you in the global maximum or only in a local one.
And here internet and the overall globalisation come into play. For example, successful entrepreneurs from Chile may be much less successful overall on the global scale. Bringing new blood to a local place may be the solution to create a boost in that place.
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