Creative Entrepreneurship at Iconstruye: A Pan Andean E-Procurement Market Maker‪.‬

Juan Correa looked out of his nineteenth floor window and noted the growing number of construction cranes visible against the backdrop of the Andes. This was a good sign and predicted that the construction business would be good during spring, the main building season in the Southern Hemisphere. Correa, CEO and a founder of iconstruye, a provider of business-to-business (B2B) procurement software for the construction industry, knew that he and his team were going to be undertaking a project where creative solutions would be required each step of the way. He knew that the models used in North America to provide (B2B) services over the Internet remained unproven, that access to Silicon Valley-style venture capital was nonexistent in Chile, and that they were proposing to develop a B2B e-marketplace (1) procurement system for the construction industry, a traditionally conservative group of businesses. Correa also wondered what would happen when iconstruye became, as he hoped, the dominant B2B procurement system in the Chilean construction industry. What would the course of action be then? How would iconstruye continue to grow? Would he and the team decide that Chile, with its relatively small markets, be sufficient? Alternatively, should the company decide to strike out in other directions, building upon its success and knowledge, perhaps entering other South American markets or even converting the system into a multilingual system and taking a position in the emerging Spanish language-based markets of the United States? That decision was some ways off; first they had to get the business up and running and cash flow positive. Latin American e-Commerce