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Two Argentinian companies selected to host MIT Sloan Global Entrepreneurship Lab projects
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Now in its 20th year, ‘G-Lab’ helps to promote entrepreneurship across Argentina
Cambridge, Mass., January 17, 2020—Technisys and Trocafone have been selected to host Global Entrepreneurship Laboratory (G-Lab) projects in collaboration with the MIT Sloan School of Management, founder of the international entrepreneurial program. These two Argentinian companies are poised to expand locally and globally and are interested in exploring how best to take that next significant step. The companies were chosen based on their business models, growth potential, and successes to date.
Teams of MBA students from MIT Sloan—one of the world’s top-ranked business schools—will be working on-site at Technisys and Trocafone throughout January to provide them with high-impact insight and analysis.
This year marks G-Lab’s 20th anniversary. Since 2000, nearly 2,500 MIT Sloan G-Lab students have worked with host companies on 643 projects at 482 startups in emerging and frontier markets in 54 countries. To date, approximately 30 G-Lab projects have been hosted in startups and companies across Argentina.
When determining project scope, host companies draw from a broad spectrum of business challenges such as growth, new market entry, pricing, marketing, benchmarking, fundraising, and financial strategy. G-Lab strongly emphasizes concrete “leave-behinds” as a primary component of the teams’ project deliverables. In the process, the MBA students gain real-world experience in creating, developing and running young enterprises with diverse economic infrastructures as well as thinking about the role of politics, culture, and other non-economic variables.
Meet the Companies
Technisys—an international company with its primary development lab in Argentina—is one of the leading global providers of next-generation digital banking platforms. Technisys’ Platform helps traditional banks transform to digital while jumpstarting challenger, neo banks, and Fintech companies in the cloud. The Platform provides greater ease for launching financial services allowing financial institutions to differentiate and win through structural flexibility, enhanced customer experiences, and seamless engagement with Fintech ecosystems.
The MIT G-Lab team is to design a killer feature for the US banking industry and benchmark key digital players in the space (Technisys included) and how that killer feature will position Technisys in the global digital banking market.
Trocafone—founded in 2014 with offices in Buenos Aires and São Paulo—buys, refurbishes, and sells used smartphones to consumers. The company has already recycled and sold more than 1.1M smartphones across a variety of sales channels: e-commerce, pop up stores, “venta telefónica,” and third-party marketplaces. As the company scales, it is looking to optimize all these channels and build a true omni-channel strategy regarding stock, pricing, and overall customer experience. The G-Lab project focuses on building algorithms and internal tools to allocate stock and define pricing for each of these channels.
Action Learning
“Across Argentina, smart people are running good companies and looking to create more good jobs,” says MIT Sloan Professor Simon Johnson, the former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund who co-founded the program in 2000. “Over the past twenty years, it has been a privilege – and an education – for our students to find ways to be helpful. Everyone returns to the United States impressed with the energy and intensity of the CEOs in these companies.”
G-Lab—based on the MIT Sloan Entrepreneurship Lab (E-Lab) model launched in 1992—is one of 15 pioneering Action Learning labs available to students at MIT Sloan. While project activities vary, they are united by common themes, including experiential, reflective, and peer learning; faculty mentoring; real-world problem solving; knowledge transfer; and, perhaps unique to MIT Sloan, a student team engagement intended to have a measurable business, which often includes a social impact. These real-time management challenges bring theory to life.
About the MIT Sloan School of Management
The MIT Sloan School of Management, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, is one of the world’s leading academic sources of innovation in management theory and practice. With students from more than 60 countries, it develops effective, innovative, and principled leaders who advance the global economy.
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