“In many Latin American countries, entrepreneurship has stopped being a side conversation and has become a practical way to unlock development. Not because it is fashionable or because governments decided to “support startups,” but because the region’s structural challenges—informality, limited access to capital, unequal opportunities—make innovation ecosystems one of the few spaces where mobility, collaboration and growth can actually happen.
For years, however, the ecosystem wasn’t really an ecosystem. Each actor worked alone: accelerators with their own agendas, government programs moving in cycles, corporate innovation units testing isolated pilots, and investment funds chasing only a handful of high-growth cases. The result was predictable: duplicated efforts, little continuity, and a very small percentage of ventures reaching meaningful scale.
My work has focused precisely on breaking that fragmentation. Over the last decade, I’ve helped bring together governments, foundations, corporates, investors and universities so they stop operating as disconnected islands and start acting as a coordinated network with shared objectives. It sounds obvious, but in practice it requires aligning incentives, designing governance, and generating trust between actors that traditionally don’t even speak the same language.
This approach has allowed us to design programs that actually move the needle:
What has been most revealing is the quality of the impact. When ecosystems begin to connect properly, capital flows faster, companies mature sooner, and the probability of survival grows. Corporate actors discover startups as partners instead of suppliers. Governments learn to design policies based on evidence, not intuition. And communities—especially in regions outside the big capitals—gain access to opportunities that simply didn’t exist before.
This is why I consider ecosystem development one of the most powerful levers for the region. It creates economic value, yes, but it also rebuilds social mobility and strengthens institutional capacity. In Latin America, where the path to development is rarely straightforward, well-designed ecosystems act as stabilizers: they reduce uncertainty, shorten learning curves and open doors that individuals alone cannot push.
Today, combining this experience with the work I do building EU↔LATAM bridges, the value is even greater. The region doesn’t just need more entrepreneurs; it needs ecosystems capable of integrating into global markets with strategy, sustainability and long-term vision. And that is exactly where this work becomes transformative.”
Additional document to support the story: CV_Clara_Ricaurte_2025_EN_updated – CLARA RICAURTE.pdf