Case Study: How Medellin Is Creating a Hub for Impact Start-ups

Medellin City, in Colombia, is seeking to create an innovative and more inclusive future, since the end of the violent era of the 1980–1990s. A combination of public, private, and community resources seems to make it possible, through entrepreneurship with positive impacts. The forced renovation of the city was done through a clear intent of complete social integration, despite the large inequalities and a culture of violence and illegality. The public sector allowed resources to large infrastructure, thanks to decentralization politics. This benefited the private sector, first the large companies as main suppliers and then the small organizations, integrated in the supply chain or by entrepreneurial programs. On the other hand, the higher education sector and the nonprofits were fundamental to form the new generations, increase relationships between actors, and push for real inclusion of all the Medellin sectors. This mainly resulted in an extremely dynamic creative sector and a real preoccupation of all citizens for improving poor-neighborhoods welfare, materialized in local non-for-profit organizations with positive social impact. As a result, Medellin also showed effective communication toward foreigners, which established nonprofit or business activities within the city. Collected data and interviews from relevant actors of the Medellin ecosystem showed the more relevant connections between stakeholders, which are making possible the raise of a regional hub for the fourth sector. This hub has Latin American classical biases, which make it relevant to be replicable inside the region, but also could be inspiration for other developing parts of the planet.