Graduating organizations and ecosystems : a new approach for universities - Results in Mexico
Mariano Bernardez, PhD., CPT
Executive Director, Performance Improvement Institute (PII)
Back in 2005, the Sonora Institute of Technology invited our team to design and become the founding faculty of a new initiative for the development of the Southern Sonora region social and organizational performance.
Our starting point was a combination of Roger Kaufman's Megaplanning model and Geary Rummler's and Dale Brethower's Anatomy of Performance (AOP). Roger, Geary and Dale joined Ingrid Guerra-Lopez, Richard Gerson, Bob Carleton and John Lazar formed with me the first faculty team, travelling for the next four years very week to Sonora, Mexico to stay a week a month coaching projects.
The PII program switched the focus from the traditional individual graduations to graduating value-adding organizations and ecosystems, under the motto "Get your company a PhD".
From 2005 through 2009 the PII graduated 34 new startups at ITSON, with more than 120 PhD and MBI (Masters of Business Incubation) students in charge of planning, organizing and placing the new organizations (for and nonprofit) in strategic markets and supported by sustainable ecosystems.
As a consequence, 9,500 direct jobs were created and when we turned the keys ofn the PhD program back to ITSON;s graduates, the South of Sonora Ecosystem had evolved into a self-sustaining entrepreneurial macro-region under the name Yaqui Valley.
The macro-region extends between Arizona, US and Sonora, Mexico, under the official denomination "Ari-Son" (that some write down as "Arisun" )
PII continues to work with international project focused on graduating projects and regions and creating sustainable ecosystems to support them and create measurable value added -in terms of revenue, jobs, and social and environmental indicators-.
The Performance Improvement Institute (PII/IMD) enters now its 11th year of existence expanding its scope to US, Argentina, Colombia and Panama,
Gonzalo Rodriguez Villanueva -the ITSON's rector who started the first PII project- is now the director of the newly created Yaqui Valley region authority.
