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Landing in Colombia with RedEmprendia

28 Oct 2019

In our previous post we told you about the first of our trips in September (which was to Marseille). This time, we are going to tell you about our big week in Colombia.

As we may have said already before, since 2018 we are associated to the University of Valencia Science Park. One of the advantages of doing so is access to programs and grants from the networks the University is member of. One of these networks is RedEmprendia, a network of universities from Spain & Latam promoting sustainable innovation and entrepreneurship.

Thanks to a program from that network (the Companies Landing), we had a small internationalization grant to make a short commercial visit to a country in Latin America. We already had some PRO users in Colombia, and the period we could do the visits did fit with Entreviñetas 2019 in Bogotá, so Colombia was a natural decision for us. We applied to the program, and thanks to University of Valencia Science Park and our host University in Colombia (University of Antioquia at Medellín), we built a 7 days mission with talks and meetings in Cali, Medellín, and Bogotá.

Landing in Colombia with RedEmprendia

Our first two days in Colombia were in Cali. Our hosts there were Expin Medialab, the space of joint investigation in Science, Art, and Technology on the Universidad Autónoma de Occidente. We were one of the speakers on the Expin Medialab Workshop, the event about innovation and creative entrepreneurship that Expin organizes each year.

In our Workshop session in the morning our public were mainly multimedia engineering and graphic design students, and we talked, of course, about Drawfolio, but also gave some advice about how to starting companies on creative industries. Other speakers were Carlos Navas, founder of Doo, and Camilo Sandoval & Harrison Zapata, UX developers at OL Software.

Landing in Colombia with RedEmprendia

On the afternoon, we went on with a workshop where we got more specific and showed some of the services and tools we use on a day-to-day basis on software, marketing, prototiping, or project management tasks. The next day, the team from Expin Medialab were kind enought to arrange for us a talk at the Fine Arts School of Cali, were we talked again about Drawfolio, and gave some advice about personal marketing and portfolio sites for visual artists. We were lucky enough to meet the management team of the school, too.

Our next stop was Medellin, were our program hosts (the Innovation unit of University of Antioquia) arranged a 2-day schedule of meetings for us, with artists, cultural projects, creative industries companies, innovation labs from university, or the management team of Medellín's startup incubator Parque E. We also could give a lecture to the alumni of the Culture Entrepreneurship Master Course, where we talked about Drawfolio and also about our experience building a creative and cultural industries business.

Landing in Colombia with RedEmprendia

Last but not least, was Entreviñetas Market at Bogotá. Entreviñetas Market was held as a part of the "Reading under the trees" event promoted by the Council of Bogotá, and took place on Bogotá's National Park (hence, its name). Entreviñetas is a market of self-published comic books and illustration, where we had the chance to meet a lot of great artists from Colombia. The Entreviñetas team also gave us a space for a workshop about Drawfolio and Portfolio Websites.

It was quite an intense week! We still had time to do some sightseeing in Bogotá: take a walk around La Candelaria, visit the stunning Gold Museum, or go up Monserrate. The Landing program was a great opportunity for us to start up agreements in Colombia, and we couldn't have done in without the help of RedEmprendia, the University of Valencia Science Park, and all the organizations that supported us at Cali, Medellín, and Bogotá. Thanks a lot to everyone!


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