Eduardo Marty is the Founder of Junior Achievement Argentina, an educational outreach program. Students in JA are taught how to prepare a business plan and raise funds. Approximately 50,000 students per year across Argentina participate. Marty has also held academic posts as professor at the University Francisco Marroquín, Guatemala, and the University of Buenos Aires. He was the host of Buenos Aires’s major television talk show Boom—Politics and Economics. We met with Mr. Marty in Buenos Aires to talk about his business education programs for young people and the state of entrepreneurship in South America.
. Kaizen:Where did you grow up in Argentina?
Marty: In Buenos Aires. I went to elementary and high school here and the University too.
Kaizen: Before university, what was your education like?
Marty: Well, I went to school called National Buenos Aires. That’s the oldest high school in Buenos Aires, created in 1770. It’s a public school, but it’s a very prestigious one. It was the first school in Buenos Aires. To enter, you need to pass a very tough test once you finish elementary school. From five students submitting and applying—they accept just one. Our education is divided into elementary school and then secondary school. When I was in sixth grade I tried to pass the exam and I did it, so I was one year younger than the rest.
The Jewish community attends that school a lot. It is a very intellectual community here in Buenos Aires. By the way, you know that after New York Buenos Aires has the second largest Jewish community in the hemisphere.
Colombia may be associated with violence and drugs in popular culture, but it has recently been strengthening its entrepreneurial base, says the Kauffman Foundation’s Policy Forum Blog. The Colombian government has been removing barriers to starting businesses, educational institutions have been adding more entrepreneurship courses and programs, more business incubators are cropping up, and there is an increased focus on entrepreneurship in the media. Certainly there are still problems with drugs and violence, creating a chaotic environment that discourages many potential entrepreneurs. Nonetheless, some entrepreneurs have found creative ways to respond, such as a company that produces bullet-proof underwear.
Norm Augustine believes that America is falling behind other countries like China and India in technological innovation. This is because our culture portrays engineers and scientists as nerds rather than venerating them, because our educational system deemphasizes science and math, and because we don’t invest enough in long-term basic research. “Despite what many Americans believe,” he writes, “our nation does not possess an innate knack for greatness. Greatness must be worked for and won by each new generation.”
In our latest issue of Kaizen we feature an interview with Eduardo Marty, Founder of Junior Achievement Argentina and former host of Buenos Aires’s major television talk show Boom—Politics and Economics.
Also featured in Kaizen are student essay contest winners Kathleen Simmert, Nathaniel Branch, and Amelia Franceso, and guest speaker Nimish Adhia.
A PDF version of Kaizen is available here. We will soon post separately the full interview with Mr. Marty.
If you would like to receive a complimentary issue of the print version of Kaizen, please email your name and postal address to CEE [at] Rockford.edu.
Ken Phillips, in an article for Independent Contractors Australia, analyzes the failure of Australian government programs to nurture more entrepreneurship and innovation. The problem, he says, is that society is structured in a way that discourages self-employment. This decreases the amount of innovation in society because the experience of self-employment engenders a psychology of innovation. The self-employed person must constantly come up with new, creative ways to please clients. Phillips contrast self-employment to standard employment, which fosters a psychology of obedience to superiors and thus a lack of creative thinking.
It’s easy to understand the importance of innovators and entrepreneurs to the economy, but it’s much harder to figure out the best ways to encourage more entrepreneurship. In an article for TechCrunch, Vivek Wadhwa explores Start-Up Chile, a program that he calls “Chile’s Grand Innovation Experiment.” Most initiatives to create the next Silicon Valley have failed, Wadhwa argues, because they use a top-down approach that fatally leaves out the most important ingredient — the entrepreneurs themselves. Start-up Chile is therefore unique because, rather than building office parks and partnering with VC’s and universities, it focuses on attracting innovators and entrepreneurs from all over the world to Chile, where they will start their own businesses.
The Institute for Justice’s City Studies series examines the political red tape that keeps entrepreneurs from getting their businesses off the ground. The studies focus on “real-world entrepreneurs from eight different cities across the nation,” such as Los Angeles’ Jill Bigelow. Her “most frustrating experience while trying to open her restaurant was when an inspector would not allow her to open because her previously approved wall tile did not have enough ‘reflective value.’” Despite being in the top ten most economically free countries, the U.S. clearly has a long way to go towards truly supporting entrepreneurs.
Watch the Institute for Justice’s entertaining video that highlights some of the aggravating roadblocks that entrepreneurs face:
In his recent article “Start-Up City,” Edward Glaeser traces New York City’s long history of innovative entrepreneurs from the sea trade industry to sugar refining to the garment industry to finance. Glaeser then discusses the dependence of the economy on entrepreneurs, the current perils New York faces, and how we can encourage more entrepreneurship.
Last week, Big Think started a ten day series on the future of capitalism. Through articles and videos, the series examines the impact on capitalism of technologies such as 3D printing, virtual products and currencies, data analysis, and the relationship between governments and markets. Also featured is an interview with John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods and co-founder of Conscious Capitalism with recent CEE guest speaker Michael Strong.
Eduardo Marty is the Founder of Junior Achievement Argentina, an educational outreach program. Students in JA are taught how to prepare a business plan and raise funds. Approximately 50,000 students per year across Argentina participate. Marty has also held academic posts as professor at the University Francisco Marroquín, Guatemala, and the University of Buenos Aires. He was the host of Buenos Aires’s major television talk show Boom—Politics and Economics. We met with Mr. Marty in Buenos Aires to talk about his business education programs for young people and the state of entrepreneurship in South America.
