Challenging, but positive. That is the balance that the president of the Luksic Foundation, Paola Luksic, makes of the third edition of the Impulso Chileno contest that the organization carries out in alliance with the Corporación Simon de Cirene ¡and the Escuela de Administración UC.
Three years after the businessman and president of Quiñenco, Andrónico Luksic, created this contest, his sister Paola tells the newspaper La Tercera what have been the main lessons learned from the different editions.
“Each year brings us new lessons and this, in particular, has been a process in which we have been fine-tuning many variables of the contest, such as the focus of the entrepreneur we seek to support, the amounts, the academic content, among other things”, says Luksic, who, with respect to the third edition of this contest, points out that the selection process was more demanding, given that the idea was to favor entrepreneurs who were formalized and had started their activities in the first category.
Despite the fact that the rules of this edition were stricter than in previous years, he says that “we achieved a massive call for applications from more than 18 thousand people, which once again proves the entrepreneurial strength that we have in Chile”. Thus, out of the total number of participants, on this occasion 100 were the winners, of which 51% were women and 70% from the regions.
On this point, he specifies that due to the health crisis it was decided that this year there would not be a large event as in past editions. It was also decided to increase the number of winners from 60 to 100 and the fund to be distributed to $500 million. It was also decided to incorporate executives from the Luksic group into the mentoring network as a way of innovating and giving executives the opportunity to collaborate.
“The idea arose at a Luksic Foundation board meeting, when we were beginning to plan the mentoring process for this third version,” says Paola Luksic, adding that “we have always been concerned that the group’s companies and the family foundations should be connected, so it seemed to us that incorporating company executives into this program was a very good opportunity”.
That is why it was decided that the entrepreneurship area of the Luksic Foundation would meet with the general managers of the group’s companies: Antofagasta Minerals, Banco de Chile, CCU, Enex, Saam and Quiñenco.
“The invitation was very well received and we received more applicants than we expected,” he says.
Looking ahead, and considering how challenging the coming times are expected to be, the president of the Foundation insisted on how important it will be to adapt, “to move forward”. For this reason, she emphasizes that the organization will continue to redouble its efforts to assist entrepreneurs from all over the country, “since they are all ambassadors of Chile”.
