Author's note (May 2026): I wrote this in September 2017, a few weeks after receiving the notification that TALS was among the 6 best innovation projects in Chile. For a team of Venezuelans in Iquique, it was completely unexpected.

Top 6 in Chile: What It Means to Be the Only Foreign Team Outside the Capital

The competition and what it represented

SAP Innomarathon Chile 2017 is SAP's open innovation program in the region: a national competition seeking startups that use emerging technologies (AI, IoT, data) to solve problems aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals.

Out of hundreds of projects submitted nationally, TALS was selected among the six finalists for the Demo Day in Santiago. This wasn't a regional or university competition. It was the innovation showcase of the world's largest enterprise software multinational, evaluating projects on their technical viability and real impact potential.

Making the top six in Chile meant our idea was no longer "a good intention from two Venezuelans up north." It was a project with technical viability assessed by SAP engineers.

The geography of power in Chile's startup ecosystem

In Chile, without much euphemism, people say that "Santiago is Chile."

It's not just an expression: 80% of the country's entrepreneurial, investment and innovation activity is concentrated in the capital. The events, funds, mentors, angels, accelerators — everything gravitates around Santiago. For the Santiago ecosystem, Iquique is a mining and border trade city in the extreme north, 1,800 km away. A city that produces copper and duty-free shopping, not startups.

Being from Iquique was already a logistical disadvantage: every important event or meeting required a flight and an investment of time and money that Santiago-based projects simply didn't face. But it was also, in ways we didn't fully appreciate at the time, an unexpected advantage.

The isolation forced us to go deep.

Being foreigners: real advantages and obstacles

In 2017, Venezuelan migration to Chile was at its peak. The social context was complex: the large-scale arrival of migrants was generating visible tensions in the labor market and public perception.

Being Venezuelan in that context gave us something we couldn't buy: a different kind of hunger for success. We had no family network, no inheritance, no safety net of those who grew up in Chile. Only our engineering degrees, two years of work on TALS, and a concrete will to contribute something real.

The greatest advantage was operational resilience: we had learned to build with minimum resources, to solve with what we had, to not wait for perfect conditions to execute. That shows in a prototype.

The greatest disadvantage was ignorance of the unwritten "codes" of Santiago networking: who is who in the ecosystem, what types of relationships matter, how to present yourself to investors and institutions in a way that builds instant trust. Those cultural codes aren't taught in courses.

What the SAP judges valued

The SAP Innomarathon jury wasn't condescending to us. Their questions were technical, direct and without niceties.

What they valued in TALS, based on the feedback we received, was what they called "technical audacity." They were surprised that we were solving a real-time computer vision problem — something that normally requires GPUs and specialized hardware — using a low-cost Raspberry Pi. Technical efficiency under resource constraints struck them as a real competitive advantage, not a compromise.

The jury's phrase that has stayed with us: "Your technical execution capability under conditions of scarcity is your real competitive advantage."

The flight with the prototype in a shoebox

I remember the flight from Iquique to Santiago for the final.

The TALS prototype traveled in a shoebox reinforced with packing tape. Inside: the Raspberry Pi, the camera, the adapted power converter, the cables, and the display wrapped in fabric. The nervous system of our startup fit in carry-on luggage.

The security officers at Iquique airport stopped the box. They couldn't identify the assembly of wires and circuits. They had to call a supervisor. We had to explain — with some urgency because the flight wasn't waiting — that we were an innovation team traveling to represent northern Chile in a national SAP competition.

That moment — explaining sign language technology to a security officer while the departure time ticked down — perfectly summarized everything TALS was at that point: an important idea that almost no one understood except us and whoever watched it work.

What changed with the Top 6

SAP Innomarathon offered no monetary prize for the Top 6. What it offered was the credential.

And the credential was exactly what we needed.

"SAP validated us as one of the six best innovation projects in Chile" was a sentence we could include in any subsequent application. Not self-promotion — external assessment from a software multinational with 440,000 clients worldwide. That builds trust with organizations like CORFO in a way no pitch deck alone can.

The Top 6 was our "letter of introduction" for the CORFO Seed Capital that came in 2018. The logic of the CORFO evaluator was clear: if SAP considers them Top 6 in Chile, they have something real.

Innovating from the periphery: what centralism doesn't tell you

Northern Chile gave us something unexpected: focus without noise.

In Santiago there are too many events, too much networking, too many high-glamour distractions. An entrepreneur in Santiago can spend months attending "ecosystem" events without advancing a single line of code.

In Iquique we were alone with our prototype and with the local deaf community. No spotlight. No cameras. No investors watching every move. That allowed us to go deep on the real problem, build carefully, and arrive in Santiago with something that genuinely worked rather than a special-effects demo.

The periphery teaches you that distance from the center, though logistically costly, can be strategically valuable. Innovation that emerges from the margins has an authenticity the center rarely produces.

You don't need to be in the center to have ideas that change the center.