INNOMAPS was one of the 6 best teams in the regionals of the biggest university competition in the world held in San Francisco, USA.

March 18, 2019

Nicolás Serrano, María José De la Torre, Romina Bermeo, and Leandro Santiago presented their project INNOMAPS at the Hult Prize regionals in San Francisco, USA. The Yachay Tech University team was one of the six finalists of the competition, among more than 60 teams. Participating in the regionals was the result of winning the On Campus edition of Hult Prize at Yachay Tech. INNOMAPS is a platform that compiles open data from legally constituted public and private institutions and companies. This data is then georeferenced and made available to anyone wishing to start new entrepreneurship or business.

The goal of INNOMAPS is to contribute to an improvement in the geolocation of small and medium-sized companies to achieve a better distribution of businesses in cities. Under this premise, they sought to provide a solution to the challenge posed by the Hult Prize Foundation this year: youth unemployment. The team got to beat participants from prominent universities such as Princeton, UCLA, among others.

The idea came up when the students identified the difficulty that members of their families had when setting up a business. Most entrepreneurs in Ecuador lack formal education in business, so finding a place for business often becomes a difficult decision. The team identified this problem that entrepreneurs face in Ecuador, which, along with other factors, has resulted in businesses closing down after 2.5 years. This makes it impossible to sustain the investment and the possibility of staying throughout time.

This way, the students decided to give entrepreneurs a tool to know where to place a business, along with other specific data about the georeferenced businesses, such as the type of company and address. The team also considered factors like roads and public transportation.

Currently, the INNOMAPS project is developed in beta-version and follows the planned business model. Students expect to find people interested in investing capital to launch this application in the market. As a pilot, the team has mapped businesses from Cuenca. However, they hope to include new cities in the platform during 2019.