There are two contemporary entrepreneurial worlds. One made up of talented and well educated people that acquired their skills through education and work; and a second one, which sees the same kinds of people that come up with incredible ideas, but lack the time and the full spectrum of competences to implement them in the real world. This gap has a name: lost intellectual potential.
Let me give you an example. If we analyze data coming from the Italian statistical institute, but the same case could be made for every country, the situation comes immediately clear. From 1981 the number of graduates from higher institutions rose almost 300%, from 74.000 to 210.000. At the same time youth unemployment almost doubled from 22% to 40%. There is clearly something wrong here.
On top of this, as famously described by the Story of Lucy, Gen Y Yuppies (those born between the late 70s and the mid 90s) are chronically unhappy. The two basic reasons behind this are that parents told their Gen Y kids that they could be whatever they wanted to be, instilling the special protagonist identity deep within their psyches, but then reality turned out to be worse than the expectations.
The good news is that there is a group of young professionals looking for a solution. L-Move is a community of 170 individuals and 17 business partners, mostly based in Milan, that wants to become the bridge between the two worlds early mentioned, turn waste into synergy. They want to put at work the lost intellectual potential spread around the globe, connect an idea to the full spectrum of skills required to bring it to life.
The core idea behind L-Move is that it wants to build a protected environment of peers. Anybody can come with an idea and find preselected professionals with the right sets of skills, as well as already established companies that can offer their services in any field that could be required by a nascent company. Currently L-Move’s partners operate in fields such as artificial intelligence, engineering, video making, marketing, app development, fundraising etc. L-Move’s goal is to acquire both new professionals and new partner-companies to grow its environment, where ideas could be grounded and could finally germinate, to better help entrepreneurs structure and develop their business ideas, as it reads on their website.
The company’s CEO, Felipe Aguilera, explains to me what are going to be L-Move’s next steps. “The big moment for us is going to come very soon, on the 10th of April. As our community already counts more than 170 members, we will soon be launching the MVP of our online platform “Iperuranio”. All entrepreneurs will be allowed to post their business ideas on the platform, and they will be matched with professionals with the skills needed to bring those ideas to life, this will happen in a legally protected environment.
Ultimately, numbers regarding youth unemployment aren’t reassuring; and it doesn’t look like this is a top priority for the Italian government (too busy facing crises such as immigration and terrorism, or trying to figure out when next elections are going to be). The solution once again comes from the private sector. L-Move is a startup to create startups, without exaggeration these guys are trying to put the country back at work.