I have learned a lot about the Canadian entrepreneurship ecosystem here, working on three consulting projects with real organization while simultaneously working on my main project.

My main project as a researcher here in the EPICentre was to analyze other University-linked entrepreneurship institutions and give recommendations for EPICentre to improve their programs and actions in the local entrepreneurship ecosystem.

For my analysis, I learned a lot about Windsor’s local economy using the WE Economic Development 2018 report as reference. I discovered that Windsor has a forecast for GPA until 2023 in a constantly growing line and that manufacturing, healthcare and social assistance and trade sectors are responsible for 50% employment in Windsor. With this in mind, it is important that the EPICenter has programs that cater to the local economic needs and focus on developing new business and technologies for those industries.

I have studied global entrepreneurship organizations best practices and why their startups fail, I did a benchmark with 10 entrepreneurship organizations. I have concluded that the most important aspects for good performance in a University-linked entrepreneurship organization are:

1. Pay attention to local economic needs and have incentive programs for new businesses that will help grow the local economy;

2. Have specific programs to develop the entrepreneurial network with local leaders in University, industry and government. The results found by Guerrazzi (2018) showed that companies that received “more” complementary assets were more successful and that among the

assets, legitimation is the most important one – legitimation is to access to external resources, whether institutional, governmental or transactional such as suppliers, consumers, competitors;

I think that my process of building my research here was enriching for my understanding of entrepreneurship in a systematic way.

In Brazil, we have a lot of people with entrepreneurial intentions and entrepreneurship organizations. Our University has a huge movement run by entrepreneurship student clubs in all countries. I guess that having a student movement organized is important to engage people to have an entrepreneurship mindset. We have a lot of incubators, accelerators, angel networks but I never heard about entrepreneurship centres there, specifically in São Paulo, where I live.

I think that the Brazillian entrepreneurship ecosystem needs to focus on networking development – connecting academia, industry and government – and care about our local economy needs, social and cultural needs and care about equality in entrepreneurship (gender and ethnicity equality). With all my research here, I guess that those two points are the more important considering the actual entrepreneurship global ecosystem scenario.