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He grew up in Chile, where his family had a minimarket. Rocio Fonseca, SM ’14, was taught that he expected a life limited by his family’s social class. In his early professional years, being the first in his family to go to college, he often encountered cultural barriers in his country’s traditional business environment. Potential parents wanted to know who their parents were or hoped they would go to an elegant school. “I didn’t fit the profile,” he says. “I was an atlier.”
Disappointed, he decided that the solution was to go abroad. While spending time at MIT while studying for a sustainable business as a Sloan Fellow, CORFO helped give land to the Chilean economic development agency, where he struggled to direct the responsibility for changing the business culture. Coming from an unusual background has allowed him to see where the Chilean economy can grow and grow, he says.
Although traditionalists still question his genealogical education (and he is happy to say that he has now gone to MIT), he does not use his new status as an executive director of CORFO’s InnovaChile department to enter their world. Instead, he wants to build what he calls a “parallel path” to success in Chile, one that is open to people of all classes. One of his favorite parts of his job is to introduce talented and innovative tech entrepreneurs. His department conducts training sessions on a wide range of topics, including network protocol, prototyping capability, and export protocols. His organization is so highly respected that “it’s easy to knock on a door and connect people,” he says.
Fonseca believes that innovation can create better jobs for all, partly by moving away from Chile’s mining and agriculture-based extraction economy to something that adapts to an increasingly climate-changing world. To this end, it manages a $ 40 million annual grant — one of the largest of its kind in Latin America — for companies that do innovative and sustainable entrepreneurship. This money is especially important because Chilean startups are at very low risk for domestic venture capital. “You have to be very profitable from the start,” he says.
Since 2010, InnovaChile has supported more than 5,000 companies, with a focus on cutting-edge food production and distribution technology. Collaborators include companies that manufacture emulsions to improve the longevity of fruits and vegetables in the country, diversify plant-based protein supply of food and reduce the need for antibiotics on livestock farms to use phage technology. “It’s not just about profits, it’s also about having positive social and environmental impacts,” Fonseca says.
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