The Impact of a Customer Discovery Boot Camp on Puerto Rico’s Startup Ecosystem

Abstract

This paper presents the results of the first impact study of the Innovation-Corps Puerto Rico (ICPR) program. ICPR is a customer discovery boot camp program for entrepreneurial teams offered by Grupo Guayacán, Inc. The program was launched in 2015 and this study evaluated the program’s impact from its launch to the fall of 2020. The main exploratory objective was to track the teams’ start-up journey, measure their progress, and evaluate the overall impact of ICPR on the teams’ evolution. To achieve this, the study was designed as an in-depth longitudinal research that involved a survey and follow-up interviews with entrepreneurial teams. The research also sought to provide evidence of ICPR’s role as a cornerstone of Puerto Rico’s entrepreneurship ecosystem, a key component of the Georgia Tech Lean Startup EcosystemTM model, and a successful showcase of public-private sector collaboration. The research results provide strong evidence of the positive impact of ICPR on an entrepreneurial team’s journey as they moved from an idea or concept through a process of validation and eventually startup creation.