Life after LEINN - just the beginning of our journey
Life after LEINN - just the beginning of our journey
Life after LEINN - just the beginning of our journey
These are exciting weeks for many LEINN (Entrepreneurial Leadership & Innovation degree) teams from Mondragon Team Academy
These are exciting weeks for many LEINN (Entrepreneurial Leadership & Innovation degree) teams from Mondragon Team Academy’s Basque labs, having not been able to celebrate a graduation gala since 2019. In May the 7th and 8th generations of LEINN were finally able to celebrate their graduation in style in Bilbao’s Euskalduna and on the 10th of June the 9th generation will celebrate their graduation in the Tabakalera in Donostia.
Team companies from the MTA labs of Bilbao, Irun, Oñati, LEINN International and MINN Master proudly received their graduation certificates after their four years of hard work and team learning by co-creating.
Those who are familiar with LEINN will know that this is a Degree with a difference. Each and every LEINNer has spent the last four years as a member and partner of a real cooperative business, a Junior Business Association to be exact, learning about the values, practices and knowledge required to not only run their own business but, most importantly, work as part of a team to co-create entrepreneurial solutions to some of today’s key challenges.
At the core of the methodology are the leading thoughts, or key values, of Mondragon Team Academy. Our mission is to create together an international community of passionate teampreneurs blooming to create radical positive impact glocally, together.
So looking at our teams from Bilbao how are we working towards this mission? Here we take a look at the achievements of the team members of Newen, Nomative, Innsoul, Motion, Kovan and Tandem.
The best way to take a deeper look at the impact LEINNers create as they graduate from the degree is by understanding the projects they choose to finish with and begin their life after LEINN with. All LEINNers are given complete freedom to decide whether to focus their dissertation on their own entrepreneurial project or an innovative project within an existing business - the only requirements are that it must be practical, innovative and enterprising. In these three generations 22 of the end of degree projects have had a strong social or environmental purpose, their leaders wanting to leave a clear impact in an area they feel passionate about. Some examples include projects in sustainable fashion, healthy and sustainable food, local culture, impact measured tools, health, and support for older generations.
Of the 67 LEINNers that graduate this year 31% took on the challenge of developing their dissertation project as completely independent entrepreneurial projects, through them creating employment for themselves and in some cases creating further jobs through contracting external employees.
One of these examples is Uluwatu, co-founded initially by four members of Innsoul to create educational programmes that combine sport and the environment. Uluwatu is a cooperative that from the very beginning had a clear objective to demonstrate the importance of triple impact. The team highlights that the belief in these values “comes from the need to create a wider impact than the economical”. They understand the cooperative “as a tool to create impact for people and its surroundings”. Working together throughout the degree the co-founders realised that not only do they “share similar interests but also concerns for the future of how we do business so we joined forces and Ululwatu was born”.
The generation before Innsoul were the teams Nomative and Newen. Young entrepreneurs from the two teams decided that they wanted to tackle undesired loneliness experienced by older generations living alone and so a team of them created Kuvu to create inter-generational solutions. The team ensures the business is up to date with the sector’s challenge through “constant investigation, through the relationship with the project’s target audience and trends analysis.” In addition, last year they “decided that in addition to loneliness and quality of life we wanted to see a systematic impact analysing what other indirect impact and systems we are creating.”
And it’s not just the entrepreneurial projects that are making a difference. Many of the 69% of LEINNers that chose to innovate in an existing business also used this opportunity to leave their positive footprint. One such business that is continuing to strengthen its impact in sustainable business is Barrabés. Several LEINNers have created innovative projects there and thanks to teampreneurs from Motion and Kovan, in particular, two new tools are being created to support its network of Start-Ups on their journey towards sustainability. “Giving birth to our own projects has made us more aware of both the positive or negative impact we create in the world and decide the impact we want to create. We found many more benefits and want to share them with other companies to have an even wider impact.”
For some LEINNers these projects are in continued development, for others they have concluded them to start on the next phase of their adventure. What is clear is that LEINN was just the start of their journey of radical learning and has given them tools to better understand the impact they want to create and the courage to go out and design their own path.
AURRERA, beti AURRERA!!