Josefa Villarroel

Babson SEE and Babson Luksic Fellows

Entrepreneur, professor and mentor

All of my life I have believed that entrepreneurship is an attitude towards life and a commitment to personal freedom. It is an energy that drives, connects and transforms.

With more than 12 years working in the design, implementation and evaluation of different entrepreneurship programs, I have developed a career as a specialist in this area and I am proud to recognize that participating in the Babson Symposium for Entrepreneurship Educators program in Chile and being a Fellow in Babson’s campus were the most important experiences of my life.

It was in 2014, in my role as Executive Director of the GarageUAI, accelerator for university students, that I participated in the SEE program taught that year in Puerto Varas. Overcoming the fear that my English would not be enough, I lived a deep learning experience that generated a re-enchantment of my vision of entrepreneurship and the role that I could play in an entrepreneurial ecosystem that is sometimes very unequal for entrepreneurs.
With this new vision and energy, I decided to apply everything I learned in the SEE program to the interior of the classrooms, in working with entrepreneurs in the GarageUAI and in all the activities that I carried out.

While I was working on this goal, the scholarship arrived to study a semester at Babson College, delving into methodologies for teaching entrepreneurship. That was how in 2015 I traveled to Boston to make “Entrepreneurial Thought and Action” my philosophy of life and share with great referents of entrepreneurship education. That same semester, I received the 100 women leaders from El Mercurio award at a distance, in recognition of my work leading the GarageUAI.

All of my life I have believed that entrepreneurship is an attitude towards life and a commitment to personal freedom. It is an energy that drives, connects and transforms.”

Many projects arose from all the great opportunities that this scholarship gave me, projects in different areas but all with the same purpose of democratizing the opportunity to be an entrepreneur, sharing my learnings, my vision and my energy to create more access for those who have talent and seek to become entrepreneurs.

Thus, I joined the Girls in Tech Ada Academy where I had the privilege of being the Principal Teacher in an initiative that graduated 5 generations of technology entrepreneurs; I joined as an Expert Evaluator in the AVONNI National Innovation Awards; established my own company: “The Entrepreneurship Policies Observatory, OPEM”; participated as a panelist presenting entrepreneurship topics on the Agenda de Género of Radio ADN and Sin Corbata of TVN programs, firmly communicating my vision about entrepreneurship support programs.

With the recognition of entrepreneurs, I positioned myself as the author of the “JosefaTips”, reports on Funds and Calls for Entrepreneurship, which annually compiles, analyzes and disseminates more than 100 calls, showing that there are opportunities for all types of entrepreneurship.

I’ve also founded Más Emprendedoras, a space to make visible the institutions that promote entrepreneurship led by women, making it easier for more female entrepreneurs to find the support they need to believe in their business leadership.

And since January 2020, in an attempt to challenge myself, I moved to Easter Island to be in charge of the implementation and start-up of the Sercotec Specialized Business Center, one of the biggest challenges I have taken in my career where, without a doubt, all the knowledge and learning that I have put into practice during all these years will be key to promoting the development of new enterprises in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.