Building a Mexican startup culture over the weekends

In Mexico, a grass-roots community of entrepreneurs is working to transform the Internet industry from one that merely provides low value-added services to one that is innovation-based. To do so, it must create a culture that promotes innovation and startup companies. In countries such as China, Taiwan, and Israel a multitude of skilled returnees from Silicon Valley have established a community of startups. But in Mexico, entrepreneurs leverage their few relationships with Silicon Valley, and are learning from social media and foreign travels to recreate innovation practices at home. In this paper, we examine how this community of entrepreneurs used the Startup Weekend events to introduce new innovation practices in Mexico. At these events, participants shared their Internet product ideas and formed multidisciplinary teams that raced to create functional prototypes within the weekend. Startup Weekend worked as a catalyst for building a culture of innovation, the strengthening of the startup community, and in some cases the formation of startup companies. Participants primed themselves with business and technical knowledge. Entrepreneur communities formed in previous face-to-face events and through social media, served to create an environment of trust and sharing during and after each Startup Weekend event.