They’re Unreasonable Because They Want to Change the System

Look around, and the world is full of unsatisfactory equilibriums that entrepreneurs like Rincón love to disrupt. We are very likely in the early stages of the greatest periods of creative destruction in our global economy. Social and environmental entrepreneurs are not the answer to all our prayers, but they signal some of the ways in which we can steer the processes of change.

Their power derives from the fact that they spot dysfunction in the current system, and, unlike reasonable people who accommodate themselves to the status quo, they try to work out how to transition the system equilibrium to a different—and more functional—state.
Coming decades will require unprecedented levels of system change, so we had better listen to the unreasonable entrepreneurs who are exploring when, where, and how to effect change. In this spirit, some leading funders are already trying to identify and support social and environmental entrepreneurs.

For example, the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship has joined forces with the Lemelson Foundation to establish the Leapfrog Fund, designed to spur the transfer of successful innovations between entrepreneurs in different parts of the world. Such replication is one key part of system change, but another is altering the system conditions, the strategy adopted by would-be game changers like those behind the transparency, accountability, and emission-trading movements we will discuss in later chapters.

The risks of relative failure with such wildly ambitious goals are much greater, but the payoffs are also likely to be proportionately greater.

ParqueSoft is a nonprofit innovation park that draws budding software enthusiasts from poor communities. Within five years, it grew into a network of twelve technology centers in as many major Colombian cities in the Valle del Cauca, the southwest corridor of the country. The network houses two hundred software companies, comprising some twelve hundred workers, about 75 percent of whom are young entrepreneurs.

ParqueSoft is not a traditional incubator, however. Once an enterprise has reached a determined size and turnover, it does not leave ParqueSoft; the young people who create and develop their companies at ParqueSoft want to stay and keep growing. They also welcome new entrepreneurs who join the fold and benefit from the extraordinary leverage that comes from belonging to a dynamic, creative community where talent and know-how can solve the most complicated problems that are brought to bear from clients all over the world.

Each of ParqueSoft’s offices is a beehive of activity. Within a large open space, enterprises are organized into blocks, depending on the size of the team. Each team is a software company that designs, develops, and sells many different types of software, including optics, artificial intelligence, edutainment, bioinformatics, and nanotechnology tools. These companies currently sell their software in over forty countries. The open-space system allows for continuous informal exchanges within and between companies. Parque-Soft has created an ecosystem that stimulates innovation, inquiry, and the improvement of software products for sale to national and international clients.

Yet anyone who thinks that ParqueSoft is mainly about information technology businesses is mistaken. “ParqueSoft is a social initiative that happens to use science and technology as a vehicle,” Rincón explains. “Its objective is to stimulate democracy and social justice through the inclusion of previously marginalized young people living in low-income communities, transforming them into protagonists of their own enterprises, not employees.”

With a head of wild curly hair and a uniform of open shirts and jeans, Orlando Rincón Bonilla could easily be mistaken for one of the entrepreneurs at ParqueSoft. He is brilliant without being arrogant, frequently irreverent, and very funny. Most of all, he loves the young people with whom he works. On the day we spent at one of the ParqueSoft sites, we had many questions: “How can you be sure that the entrepreneurs that grow their ventures at ParqueSoft will also be committed to their communities’ development? What if all they want is to become as wealthy as possible and forget about being good corporate citizens?”

Within minutes, Rincón assembles a group of about twenty young men and women working in various ventures housed on the third floor of the building. He asks them the same questions. All of them start speaking animatedly and at once. An hour into the conversation, it is clear that these young people are not waiting to become successful before becoming involved in their communities. They are already involved almost as fully as they are in growing their own ventures.

Rincón is a tough act to follow, so any question of succession seems irrelevant. Nonetheless, he has set up ParqueSoft to function well without him, fully run by a council of entrepreneurs elected by the collectivity. His succession plan has been delineated from the outset, in part by how he chose the entrepreneurs who came to ParqueSoft initially and now form part of its council. Rincón is a firm believer that entrepreneurs are born, not made. “It’s genetic,” he frequently says. “You can walk into a room full of people and pick the entrepreneurs out in seconds. It’s something about the look in their eyes.” What, then, is it that makes these people seem so unreasonable?

Orlando Rincón Bonilla

Rincón’s studies in systems engineering marked a turning point. The exposure to other ways of thinking influenced his own, convincing him that ideology alone was not the answer. With a double specialization in engineering and anthropology and a passion for mathematics, he gravitated to computer science and software. So did one of his university classmates, William Corredor. In 1984, the two decided to go into the software business. They created Open Systems, a private company that makes software products and services for fixed and mobile telephone networks as well as for the cable television, Internet, domestic gas, electricity, and drinking water sectors.

Fifteen years later, Rincón had become wealthier than he could ever have imagined, but he was not happy. He was uneasy with what seemed to be the inescapable tension between maximizing profits and prioritizing his country’s social development needs. He believed deeply in the innovative capacity of his fellow Colombians. One question in particular troubled him: what model would allow Colombia to grow economically without compromising the values of justice and equity to which Rincón was firmly committed?

He went in search of the answers. First, he visited India to see how this country had managed to transform itself into a global leader in information technology services, but he did not find entrepreneurs. Rather, he found managers and millions of workers, all contracted by large national and international companies whose executives lived in comfortable neighborhoods in Delhi, Bangalore, Los Angeles, New York, and London. Rincón interpreted what he saw as a new form of slavery justified by the rationale that these workers were earning somewhat better salaries than they would have received in the local market. Moreover, he was troubled by what he saw as the forced Americanization of the workers, who were able to advance their careers to the degree that they spoke English “like a Yank” and had adopted American-sounding names.

From India he went to Ireland. Perhaps the secret to Colombia’s economic and social development lay there? After all, Ireland had been touted as one of the hot spots for competitive industries, including IT. Despite the tremendous affinity Rincón developed for the people there, the Irish miracle he discovered was akin to a large maquiladora for multinational corporations such as IBM and Microsoft. It seemed that there was little or no indigenous IT entrepreneurial activity—it had all been imported from abroad. For Rincón, whatever model Colombia followed would have to recognize the ingenuity and capacity of Colombians and to stimulate, wherever possible, their ability to be entrepreneurial, self-employed, and independent. Upon his return, he decided to invest his fortune in boosting entrepreneurialism and, in the process, changing Colombian society.

His stake in Open Systems, a leading technology solutions provider based in Colombia with 10 million customers across six Latin American countries and 2004 revenues of $14 million, had made him independently wealthy. In 1999, he left Open Systems— although he still owns a stake in the company—and started Parque-Soft.

“Once I found my way, I wanted to generate a shortcut for many intelligent, educated, poor young people so that they could generate companies of their own and create new leadership for our society,” he explains. “So instead of spending my money on luxuries or vices, I began to invest in people in the belief that my money could be useful to others like me.”

A few years ago, Muhammad Yunus—the world’s leading social entrepreneur, founder of the revolutionary Grameen Bank, pioneer of microfinance, and winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize— described his breed to us as “70 percent crazy.” It’s extraordinary how often his fellow entrepreneurs have told us that they have been called crazy by the media, by colleagues, by friends, and even by family members. But they are crazy like the proverbial fox. They look for—and often find—solutions to insoluble problems in the unlikeliest places. They are driven by a passion to expand business thinking to reach people in need. Thus, many are pioneering and helping map out future markets where most of us would only see nightmarish problems and risk.

Consider Orlando Rincón Bonilla and his nonprofit model designed to bootstrap poor communities into the twenty-first century. Mention his native Colombia, and the drug cartels, guerillas, and paramilitary are among the first things that come to mind. A youngster growing up poor in this beautiful Andean country might seem to have only those three options before him. But Colombia is nothing if not a country of contrasts, and it was in the very barrios that feed criminal activity that Rincón was born.

One of ten siblings from a poor family in Cali, he grew up feeling the sting of both poverty and exclusion.6 As a teenager, he became a leftist activist and joined a youth organization run through his neighborhood church. The priest named him president of the association, but Rincón refused to even set foot in the building. He didn’t want to be constrained by organizational expectations, including those of the Catholic Church. Instead, the group met in the park— the center of community life. His political activism soon earned him a reputation. It also cost him a place at the public university but, in the process, opened up other opportunities. He won a scholarship and attended the University of Medellín, which was particularly surprising given that, as a private university, it was geared to educate the sons of the elite, most of them businessmen.