Foreword

This publication investigates how Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in Latin America support entrepreneurship and innovation in their ecosystems. It assess strategies and practices of eleven HEIs across six countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Uruguay. It highlights good practices put forward by Latin-American HEIs to support entrepreneurship development through incubation and acceleration activities, and entrepreneurship education. It also underlines strategies fostering innovation through collaboration with government and business, including in multi-campus institutions.

The review offers suggestions to HEIs on how to strengthen the linkages between entrepreneurial HEIs and their regional ecosystems, including by: increasing the visibility of some forward-looking initiatives; providing more stable funding for knowledge transfer activities; and developing further metrics to assess impact.

The publication is the result of a collaboration between Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), and Banco Santander, which was initiated in 2019 at a joint event in Paris bringing together Latin-American HEIs to discuss their entrepreneurial and innovative agenda. The event confirmed the interest of Latin-American HEIs in engaging in a review process, and highlighted complementarities between the work streams of the three partner institutions. The review draws on a number of fact-finding processes including a survey to all participant HEIs as well as bilateral interviews with university representatives and local stakeholders (public authorities and firms collaborating with the universities).