The era of software innovation teams

Innovation and technological development are some of the main issues currently being worked on by the vast majority of companies around the world. The purpose now of the teams and managers is to take on the challenges that industry 4.0 impliesto reach that point where they manage to combine advanced production and operations techniques with intelligent technologies and software that are integrated into organizations, societies and assets.

(Seguros Bolívar launches app to promote care and well-being).

This situation can be seen in the latest Global Survey on Innovation, prepared by PwC, in which the opinion of 1,757 company executives from more than 25 countries around the world was collected, of which, 43% stated that innovation is a competitive necessity for their organization, and even 62% assure that they will grow up to three times faster in the next five years if such a strategy is promoted within their companies.

And within the general framework of this innovation strategy, its fundamental pillars are around products and technologies, however, most consider that one of its greatest challenges is the lack of tech talent to carry out the development of new products. .

This challenging scenario for many of the companies was what led three students from the Universidad de los Andes four years ago: Daniel Soto, director of technology; Juan Santiago Acevedo, executive director and Alejandro Córdoba, creative director, to create Three Astronautsa startup that is transforming the way of making software throughout the continent by being the first organization that is promoting the trend of hiring innovation teams, that is, tech professionals who are hired around a specific project.

(What is the Sandler method and how it can increase your sales).

Some time later, a fourth “astronaut” would join this combo, Juan Esteban Chaparro, who is currently the product director and who would be part of that axis that would lead this startup to be one of the pillars of the largest ecosystems of innovation and software development in the continent, billing close to 2 million dollars since 2017.

“We have become that technological ally that allows companies to have an innovative technological construction capacity and this is due in part to the fact that we develop software for the end user and not for our client, that has caused us problems, but it allows us to in the end deliver a product that really generates value to the users of each market”, assured Santiago Acevedo.

Its popularity in this sector has been such that it reached the ears of the organizers of one of the most important events in the United States (USA), Miami Fashion Week, where they managed to transform a physical event into a digital experience through of an administration panel that served to develop the event and a web platform that generated great interaction with Internet users from all over the world.

Another of the great projects they worked on was with a startup known as Harmonie for the development of a mobile, web and smart TV app that helps people sleep, relax and live a full life. In addition to their development teams, they have passed through organizations as prominent as the University of Los Andes, the Colombian Chamber of Infrastructure, EAFIT, Banco Finandina, Rentandes and Magaya, one of the largest logistics companies in the United States.

In this way, these entrepreneurs have already completed their history: 90 projects in more than 10 countries on the continent, they have offices in both the United States and Colombia, and have deployed a network of approximately 70 ‘astronauts’ or collaborators who come from Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, Ecuador, Peru and Argentina, among other countries.

The executive director of Tres Astronautas assures that currently one of the greatest difficulties for companies is to change the root processes of organizations around a well-planned technology strategy that is aligned with commercial interests, but not stop thinking about users.

“Our value proposition and what has led us to different Latin American countries is that we make fully trained teams and experts in different areas available to the client, but who are not vitiated by the organization’s environment, this allows them to develop products innovators”, Acevedo added.

This model of contracting innovation teams has been very well received in recent years, in part due to the shortage of workers in the technology area in Latin America, since according to the international consulting firm specializing in personnel selection, PageGroup, it is expected that By the end of 2022 there will be a 48% deficit in the digital workforce on the continent.

In Colombia alone, according to the Ministry of Information and Communication Technologies, by the year 2025, there will be a deficit of 200,000 workers in this sector, the highest percentage in the last ten years. In addition, that already more than 70% of Colombian companies have difficulties to fill positions in their technology departments.

Like Yuri Gagarin, Neil Amstrong, Valentina Tereshkova or Arnaldo Tamayo, these four astronauts have big dreams, and among them, it is to become one of the most recognized Latin American companies in the world in terms of how to make software through of innovation teams; consolidate itself as one of the best Colombian companies in terms of design and continue taking users and different organizations to the moon with its software projects.