The Impact Entrepreneur has to be patient. They have to work long and hard to reach their full potential. The moment their service or product brings systemic change, the Impact Entrepreneur’s work is done. Patience is always a virtue, but for the Impact Entrepreneur, it is a rule. Being patient is just one of the characteristics inherent to Impact Entrepreneurs, such as resilience, focus, motivation, empathy, adaptability, and many others.

Although we recognize that there are people who are born with a flair for Impact Entrepreneurship, and we know many, training continues to be an asset, and even full-fledged Entrepreneurs with years of baggage and know-how continue to actively seek out more sources of knowledge and opportunities to educate themselves in different areas that could be useful in the long term.

Today, Impact is no longer the ugly duckling of Entrepreneurship, and the focus on the Social sector is growing daily. The prospects of a future with more opportunities encourage more organizations to invest in training Entrepreneurs.

What if they allow you to acquire valuable knowledge before entering the Ecosystem? What if they invest in your education as a future Entrepreneur and empower you with tools you can apply along your path?

From an early stage, NOVA SBE realized the need to train young people to enter the Ecosystem armed with theoretical knowledge and fieldwork. With this in mind, they took the innovative decision to create the Master’s Program in Impact Entrepreneurship and Innovation.

Casa do Impacto has been following them closely for a long time, and the opportunity to promote the Impact Entrepreneurship Bootcamp was a natural step in this relationship, resulting from a shared desire.

For five days, we hosted the Master’s students for an immersive Impact Bootcamp to provide the ideal environment for applying the methodologies and tools learned last semester to a project to be developed during the current semester.

The Bootcamp was designed to meet the various needs of a very heterogeneous group of around thirty young people and explored different themes through different dynamics: masterclasses, inspiration and training sessions, office hours, mentoring, peer review, team and fieldwork.

We focused on learning by doing through the practical application of theoretical knowledge in projects to be developed in the real world and on learning by sharing, which we believe is essential among Entrepreneurs who can work collaboratively to solve each other’s problems while seeing their challenges from a different perspective and unlocking methodologies and tools that are useful in their context.

As this was an intense fieldwork program, it made perfect sense for the students to be able to get in touch with Impact Entrepreneurs, Mentors, and Experts in various fields who, based on their real-world knowledge, could follow the progress of each project and assess how it might apply to the world we live in today.

With us we had Inês Sequeira (Director and Founder of Casa do Impacto), Anne-Laure Fayard (Academic Director of the Master in Impact Entrepreneurship and Innovation), Sai Kalvavalle (Assistant Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at Nova SBE) Steve Adler (Founder of Clime Tech Lisbon), Raquel Félix (Specialist in Design Thinking Consultancy & Facilitation), Emet Zeitz (Head of Ecosystem), Bernardo Afonso (CFO of Code for All), Catarina Miguel Martins (Founder of maroong), Elena Duran (Founder and Director of 55+ ), +), Gustavo Freitas (Head of Social Innovation), Lourenço Sá Nogueira (Impact and Investment Manager), Nuno Comando (Head of Programs and Communications da Casa do Impacto), Sean Tierney (Founder of Problemattic).

Our invitation from the outset was to “Get our hands dirty” and challenge previous assumptions, (re)designing, making mistakes, repeating, and evaluating what might or might not work. One of the messages we like to convey to our community is that making mistakes should be normalized because it ends up being an inevitable step when you decide to take a risk. Entrepreneurship is a constant risk that doesn’t always pay off as expected, although it always does if it has an Impact.

During these five days, a lot has failed, and a lot has been tried again. More important than the projects created here are the Entrepreneurial Minds that developed over the time we spent together (earning 0.5 credits was also a good motivation).

We’re grateful for the trust NOVA SBE has placed in us, and we’re sure it will be an example that more organizations will look to when they ask themselves if the risk of investing in training Impact Entrepreneurs is worth it. It takes patience, but we’re sure it is.

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