Sprout E-course Alumnus Story: Perla Tapia

Perla Tapia and her team are about to launch a social innovation centre in San Luis Potosí, Mexico. It is the first of its kind in the region, and the team has plans to launch others in Costa Rica and Colombia in the near future.

Modeled on social innovation centres in other cities, the centres bring together young social innovators and experts in a range of fields, including engineering, medicine, technology and marketing. Tapia and her team are currently on waitlist for a space in The Center of Innovation and Transfer Technology, which provides space for entrepreneurs. The City of San Luis Potosí, where Tapia lives, is also interested in partnering.

The idea for her project began at a Microsoft YouthSpark event in Mexico. It provided key inspiration as well as support for Tapia and other innovators. Says Tapia: “Meeting people that have that same interest as you, in person, is the best part of the [YouthSpark] event. We have a group on Facebook, where people post ideas, comment on project advances and share many things. It is like adopting a family.”

In addition to YouthSpark, she credits her TakingITGlobal Sprout e-course with helping her develop a vision of her project. While her college offered many courses on entrepreneurship and innovation, only the Sprout e-course did so with a social innovation emphasis.

The Sprout e-course was influential in developing their long-range plan for effective development. “The development of the project was slow,” notes Tapia, “but the steps that we took to change the project were important.”

Tapia is a recent college graduate and information technology engineer who is committed to using her education and creativity for social innovation. One of her earlier projects was a program that enabled the blind to take high school and college courses online; it was donated to a nonprofit that serves the blind and has been highly successful.

Building on this earlier work, one of the first projects at the Social Innovation Centre is a learning tool that works for special-needs students as well as other preschoolers and kindergarteners, in developing literacy.

Social innovation centres work as a hub for creative people, especially youth, who want to network to make the world a better place. While it is more costly to have a physical space than a virtual space for the sharing of ideas, spending time in person and having a central meeting place is key for social innovators. With face-to-face connections, projects can take off more quickly and resources shared more readily, and the social benefit of the space is also easy to see. Perla observed this when attending the Microsoft YouthSpark event as well, which brought global youth together.

“One thing that I really liked was that we had classmates that are Microsoft Student Partners in other countries,” says Tapia. “They had the opportunity to come to Mexico and meet Mexicans, enjoy the food, the people, the places. I think it was different because they had the opportunity to travel to another country and meet and know the people, the food and everything different from their countries.”

While they are starting in San Luis Potosí, Tapia hopes other new centres will open soon and that the team’s project will be a model for youth in other parts of the world. Connecting through YouthSpark and TakingITGlobal is “incredibly” helpful for social innovators like Tapia.

“The technology is global, so your advances can help the whole world. Not just my country, or my city but you can help everywhere.”