Sometimes great ideas can hide in plain sight—innovative solutions are far too often overlooked. Even social entrepreneurs with the most passion and ingenuity can be missed. TEDx events are one way to address that problem—our events play a role as powerful platforms for discovery. At TEDxTukuy we work to surface hidden movements and ideas. Among those movements, we make social entrepreneurship easier to find.
Each year we bring to our stage a diverse group of speakers to share their knowledge, insights, and experience in themes that range from the team dynamics of mountain climbing to girls’ access to quality education, from neutrino research to pharmacogenetics.
This year, Vania Masías, a social entrepreneur who changes the lives of thousands of young people through dance, presented to the TEDxTukuy community. Her initiative is helping to transform former gang members into proud community leaders. Aquilina Palomino, an entrepreneur that implemented a new way of delivering iron through chocolate, explained how her product is helping to reduce anemia. And Rodrigo Coquis presented an innovation that makes engines more efficient—a fuel treatment system which reduces consumption and pollution.
These and other speakers presented to an engaged and diverse audience interested in learning, sharing, and helping others. Our community gathers the public and private sector, academia, entrepreneurs, students, and business owners. It’s a community that approaches new ideas with a predisposition for action and collaboration.
This year we expanded our community thanks to a partnership between TED and the Skoll Foundation around the TEDx project: TEDx Skoll Conversations. This partnership connected the Skoll Foundation with TEDx communities in four cities, including ours, Lima. This presented an opportunity to connect local social entrepreneurs with a larger network and audience, the Skoll Foundation network, broadening TEDx as a platform for discovery.
It also allowed our local community to further their understanding of social entrepreneurship in its development the region. We hosted a conversation space where insights specific to the social entrepreneurship community were shared. Skoll awardees shared their experiences as veteran social entrepreneurs. Our community got a better understanding of the state of social entrepreneurship and of where their organizations and initiatives fit and where they can add value.
Through these and other activities, we learned more about how the social entrepreneurship ecosystem looks in Peru: what is working and what is missing. It is an active ecosystem, with institutions like Kunan, a social entrepreneurship platform and TEDxTukuy exhibitor, finding hundreds of entrepreneurs annually through its competitions. It also showed that the structures to support new entrepreneurs are still weak and most enterprises fail to achieve scale. The growing next generation of social enterprises will require the support of the seasoned entrepreneurs, partners, and ecosystem actors.
These insights can provide a first step to further action and show that TEDx, with its diverse community and its power to gather people around exciting ideas, can serve as a bridge for people and institutions that want to improve the world.
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