**This article is written by Pablo Ignacio Peralta, head of entrepreneurship programs, Córdoba Innovation and Entrepreneurship Agency, Argentina. This post is part of a special entrepreneurship policy series for Global Entrepreneurship Week (#GEW2020). Curated in partnership with the Startup Nations policy community, this series of guest articles seek to highlight how public servants can remove barriers to entrepreneurs, by highlighting examples of policy approaches from around the world.
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The Province of Cordoba is one of the few regions in Argentina that has a specialised, public-private agency focused on the entrepreneurial and innovation economy.

Created in 2016, our main objective is to bring together the public sector, academia, the tech and other private sectors and private sectors in support of innovative entrepreneurs.

We see entrepreneurship and innovation as intricately linked. Through a portfolio of programs, we work to support innovation that is fueled by the entrepreneurial spirit because evidence shows it drives economic development and competitiveness.

In less than a decade, we have successfully worked to lower barriers to entrepreneurship, such as access to early stage capital.

In 2020, we had to rapidly adapt to the new context imposed by the global Covid-19 pandemic to protect the gains our province had made in favour of entrepreneurs.

Despite high levels of uncertainty, it was not the time to paralyse, but rather to leverage our entrepreneurial community in meeting the deep social and economic challenges arising from the pandemic.

Our working groups therefore continued brainstorming and coordinating, even during the preventive social isolation and national mandatory lockdown.

One the first support mechanisms to help entrepreneurs cope and to enlist them as allies in finding a way out of the pandemic-induced crisis was the Covid-19 edition of the Boosting Entrepreneurship and Projects Program (“Programa Impulso a Emprendimientos y Proyectos”), launched in April 2020.

This 8-week training program, detailed in the attached brief (Spanish-only), entailed an enormous amount of coordination across different areas, both internally at the agency to mobilise all teams, and externally in terms of the involvement of volunteer mentors and facilitators.

Despite the challenges in mobilising ecosystem stakeholders at a difficult time, the success of the program showed the level of dynamism in the province’s entrepreneurship and innovation ecosystem.

Over 80 people participated across the program components, including the selected entrepreneurs, mentors, specialists and representatives of 23 entrepreneur support organisations (e.g. accelerators, incubators, universities).

Devoting scarce public and private resources also demanded carefully measuring the impact of the program on enterprises, and taking into account different variables.

While the agency will carry out a new measurement at the end of 2020 to track the impact on the program beneficiaries, results as of the July 2020 demonstrated that:

  • 55% of the projects that were in very early stages (e.g. idea stage) were able to advance to a pre-commercialisation stage

  • 67% of the early-stage ventures received commercial validation of their products and increased their customer base.

  • The media amplified the exposure of participating entrepreneurs, as recorded in 47 news articles across 23 media outlets.

Since this program, our agency has also achieved at least three other milestones in strengthening organisations that support entrepreneurs. We believe that working at the ecosystem-level ultimately benefits more innovators. — Pablo Ignacio Peralta

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