NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Tuesday, August 7, 2012

Pipa (Portuguese for “kite”) is an incubator, or to be more specific an accelerator, focused on supporting entrepreneurs looking to create long-term sustainable value through business. We aim to support these entrepreneurs in their quest to create positive social, environmental and financial impact, something Brazil is engaging with more and more.

While we strongly believe current paradigms of business and capitalism are losing relevance in the context of rising populations, inequality, environmental degradation and exponentially advancing technology, we also believe that business is one of the best forms of creating lasting social impact. This is because it is self-sustaining and thereby scalable.

Reaching For New Sources For Innovation

The average life span of Fortune 500 companies fell from 75 years in 1937 to 15 years in 2011. This is a trend showing every sign of continuing. Much of the innovation we see around us today is coming from the bottom up, be it in garages in Silicon Valley where high-tech companies are born, or villages in Africa that are hacking cellular phones to serve as banks.

In a search to reinvent business, the founding partners at Pipa have been working with some of the largest companies in the world including Coca-Cola, Whirlpool, P&G, Phillips, and Natura. At Pipa we are looking to create a space and process to be able to work with entrepreneurs that may not have the scale of giant companies, but do have a degree of innovative agility that is hard to match.