Historical series In a pioneering initiative, Itaú announces an event-based innovation platform to democratize access to information on innovation
The bank wants innovation to go from inspiration to application and will democratize access to the most current content about trends in the world. The goal is to encourage entrepreneurship in Brazil and generate business opportunities.
São Paulo, January 2023 – Itaú Unibanco announces the creation of an innovation platform based on events— its own and sponsored—with the objective of democratizing access to information discussed in some of the main forums around the world. With the initiative, the bank wants to turn from inspiration to application. The platform is already sponsoring two of the largest innovation festivals on the planet, SXSW (South by Southwest) and the Web Summit franchise in Rio de Janeiro. It will also hold proprietary events and other actions to be announced in the coming months. With this pioneering initiative in the financial sector, Itaú intends to encourage innovation and entrepreneurship, connect people, companies and organizations to strengthen this market in Brazil, and generate new business opportunities.
“The creation of the Itaú Innovation Platform is part of our movement to build the bank of the future. Through it, we want to empower people to practice innovative thinking. We will share our repertoire, eclectic visions, thoughts, and disruptive ideas that encourage our teams, our clients, and Brazilians to seek innovation in different areas. Innovation is in people’s daily lives; it can arise from small, everyday actions. We just need to train our eyes and thinking so we can apply it in the most diverse areas and develop our businesses,” said Renato Haramura, Itaú Unibanco’s Institutional Marketing Superintendent. “The most innovative countries are among the fastest growing in the world,” he added.
Renato explained that the goal is to build a bridge between what is discussed in the world’s main events, the Brazilian entrepreneurship system, and Itaú’s innovation and intrapreneurship system. Every two or three months these systems will be fed with new information about the main discussions taking place in the world. This is where proprietary events, such as Tech Founders, Cubo Conecta, and others, come in.
“These festivals are not always accessible to our reality, starting with language, for example. Our goal is to make them so”, he explained.
Internally, the platform will stimulate intrapreneurship among the nearly 100,000 employees of the bank, encouraging them to innovate to bring the best solutions to customers. It will also provide tools to encourage innovation among entrepreneurial customers, such as those who already participate in the Rede Mulher Empreendedora program, as well as SMEs and large companies. These actions will be added to the initiatives already carried out by Cubo Itaú that stimulate innovation in different areas of knowledge and entrepreneurship. Cubo Conecta is an international community that, since 2015, has curated startups in the traction phase with high scalability potential to boost business and the economy.