Photo: Rodrigo Duarte
In October, 10 finalist businesses from the 2022 Business Call participated in the pre-acceleration workshop offered by AMAZ in partnership with Sense-Lab.
The workshop took place in a jungle hotel in Iranduba, Amazonas, in a three-day immersion in which entrepreneurs were focused on thinking about their businesses and connecting with their peers who work in the Amazon region.
The AMAZ and Sense-Lab teams worked on Model C with male and female entrepreneurs, including building an impact and business matrix.
O Model C works from two tools that have been used to model socio-environmental impact businesses – Business Model Canvas and Theory of Change -, and proposes an approach that respects, values and feeds off of both with the purpose of contributing to mature impact businesses, guiding and encouraging business and impact to be thought out together.
Gabriela Souza, investment analyst at AMAZ, considers the pre-acceleration as a key moment to really understand how the accelerator can contribute to business development: “It was a very important moment for the AMAZ team, to get to know entrepreneurs in practice , monitor how they are evaluating the development of the business model and the impact model and connecting with the support they expect from us along the acceleration journey.”
Yurik Ostroski, from Sense-Lab, highlights the quality of the entrepreneurs who participated in the pre-acceleration: “For us it is a very good exchange, because we learn a lot about the local reality, the contexts of these challenges and bring a bit of tools. It is an extremely rich construction.”
The monitoring specialist at Fundo JBS pela Amazônia, Sâmera Adães, accompanied the pre-acceleration journey: “For me it was enriching, mainly to understand a little more about the dynamics, difficulties and the whole process that these businesses are going through, and also the power to somehow, who knows in the future, contribute a little more for them to develop.”
Model C: thinking about the business and the impact
Photo: Rodrigo Duarte
The construction of impact and business models based on the workshop focused on Model C seeks to deliver value to all these businesses, whether or not they are selected for the acceleration journey.
“I think that for the first time I am able to really think deeply about my business, and the tools presented add a lot of value to what we are doing. They put us in a situation of contesting some ideas, but always in a proactive way,” analyzes José Mattos Neto, from Via Floresta
Priscila Almeida, from Amazônia Smartfood, highlights the broader view of business impacts: “Through pre-acceleration, we are able to identify, visualize and create opportunities for other impacts that we were not identifying.”
For Vicente Tino, from Tree Earth, the concepts brought by the pre-acceleration and the exchange with other entrepreneurs were very important: “It made me take time to think about my business, and to think together with a team that is focused on improving the Amazon."“AMAZ, I think, more than any other partner that we may have, allows us to have direct access to what is being done on the ground, in the forest, and this is very important for my business”, says Rafaela Romano, from Impact Finance.
Connection between businesses is a strong point in pre-acceleration
The pre-acceleration offers male and female entrepreneurs the opportunity to get to know other businesses operating in the Amazon region, providing an environment for exchange and trust between them.
Individual challenges and solutions can help to shorten paths from the exchange of experience. Often, partnerships arise at this stage of the selection promoted by AMAZ.
Exchange, learning and individualized attention are three points highlighted by Mércio Sena, from Manawara: “You leave the world you are immersed in all the time, and often understand that those pains are yours alone. But here we find others who go through the same pain. This pre-acceleration also gives us content that enables understanding and other views, and in addition to this collective construction, we have individual attention with regard to doubts and clarifications specific to our business.”
Kairós Canavarro, from Ekilibre Amazônia, and Manuela Paim, from Moda Paimm, agree with Mércio and point out that in this connection it is always possible to find in other businesses some strategy or solution to boost your own business and also establish partnerships.
For Valéria Moura, from Deveras Amazônia, the opportunity to be part of an innovation system in the Amazon, together with other businesses that work for this socio-biodiversity economy to grow, makes a lot of difference in thinking about the future of your business.
For Pedro Nogueira, from Cumbaru, the diversity of businesses present in the pre-acceleration period brought a rich experience of contact with other things and realities not yet known and of learning.
“We are observing synergies between the businesses and also managing to deepen the understanding of the impact models. We have discussed a lot about what our impact is, how to structure this and create indicators, and it is great to be able to count on the knowledge of Sense-Lab and the AMAZ team on this journey”, analyzes Marcelo Salazar, from Mazô Maná.
