ABSTRACT
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.
- Appadurai, A. 1996. Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Univ Of Minnesota Press, 1996.Google Scholar
- Beck, K., Beedle, M., Bennekum, A.V., et al. 2001. Agile Manifesto.Google Scholar
- Beck, U. 2000. What is globalization? Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
- Blank, S. G. 2005. The Four Steps to the Epiphany. Cafepress.com.Google Scholar
- Brown, J. S. and Duguid, P. 2000. The Social Life of Information. Harvard Business Press. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Irani, L., Dourish, P., and Mazmanian, M. 2010. Shopping for Sharpies in Seattle: Mundane Infrastructures of Transnational Design. Proc. ICIC 2010. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Iwabuchi, K. 2002. Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism. Duke University Press Books.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Mark, G. 2002. Extreme collaboration. Communications of the ACM 45, 89--93. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Nardi, B. and Whittaker, S. 2002. The place of face-toface communication in distributed work. In P. Hinds and S. Kiesler, eds., Distributed work. MIT Press.Google Scholar
- Nardi, B. A. 2005. Beyond Bandwidth: Dimensions of Connection in Interpersonal Communication. JCSCW 14, 91--130. Google ScholarDigital Library
- O'Riain, S. 2000. Net-Working for a Living: Irish Software Developers in the Global Workplace. In Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections, and Imaginations in a Postmodern World. University of California Press.Google Scholar
- Ries, E. 2011. The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. Crown Business.Google Scholar
- Saxenian, A. 1996. Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128. Harvard University Press.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Saxenian, A. 2007. The New Argonauts: Regional Advantage in a Global Economy. Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
- Shore, J. and Chromatic. 2007. The Art of Agile Development. O'Reilly Media. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Startup Weekend. 2011. Anual Report.Google Scholar
- Takhteyev, Y. V. 2009. Coding Places: Uneven Globalization of Software Work in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.Google Scholar
- Teasley, S., Covi, L., Krishnan, M. S., and Olson, J. S. 2000. How does radical collocation help a team succeed? Proc. CSCW 2000. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Tuomi, I. Networks of Innovation: Change and Meaning in the Age of the Internet. Oxford University Press, 2006. Google ScholarDigital Library
- FAQ - Startup Weekend. http://startupweekend.org/about/faq/.Google Scholar
Index Terms
- Building a Mexican startup culture over the weekends
Comments