Start-Up Chile started 9 months ago and Junar is the only one of 23 companies that has attracted investment, and it is an Argentine company. No entrepreneur from the USA has been successful.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other organizations try to solve problems by identifying a specific point of intervention and applying their efforts against a theory of change. Unfortunately, Start-Up Chile refuses to identify a specific point of intervention, as Steve Blank advised after his visit to Chile last December:

    My sense is that Chile has not yet “declared a major.” Saying that you support entrepreneurship and innovation is a start, but the sentence needs to be finished. Entrepreneurship and innovation in what field? …. alternative energy? materials science? food science? cellulose outputs? video games and film? South American web commerce hub? automated mining? UAV’s?

Start-Up Chile lacks focus and rejects Steve Blank:

    We accept projects from all business scopes ranging from biotech to energy to mobile and beyond. Throughout the 2010 pilot phase, there have been a number of Start-Up Chile participants who exemplify the diversity that the program strives to seek.

The second part of the Gates Foundation principle, applying efforts against a theory of change, implies that the government should justify intervention into a healthy free market by identifying the supposed “market failure”; in other words, telling a story that describes a process in which the intervention will be phased out and the free market revives. More: http://brophyworld.com/startup-companies-in-chile/