On the wall of Charlie Kimber’s office in Arauco’s headquarters on the 14^th floor of a Sanhattan skyscraper hangs a huge map of the United States. Pointing to North Carolina on the Atlantic coast, Kimber traces an imaginary railway line through Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas.

While thousands of Chileans aspire to study in the United States, only a handful actually gets the chance to do so. But things will become a little easier for those would-be students from March next year when New York’s Columbia University opens its doors in Santiago. Columbia has chosen the Chilean capital as the site for it latest “global center”. It already has similar centers in Amman, Beijing, Mumbai and Paris and is in the process of opening in Nairobi and Istanbul. Santiago will serve as Columbia’s hub for Spanish-speaking Latin America.

A modern office building on the outskirts of Viña del Mar may seem an unlikely place to find a world-leading research center, but it is here, on the sixth floor, that a dozen US and Chilean scientists, engineers and industrial designers are developing products that could improve the quality of life for millions around the globe.

Un moderno edificio de oficinas en las afueras de Viña del Mar parece un lugar poco probable para encontrar un centro de investigación de liderazgo mundial, pero es aquí, en el sexto piso, que una docena de científicos, ingenieros y diseñadores industriales estadounidenses y chilenos están desarrollando productos que podrían mejorar la calidad de vida de millones de personas alrededor del planeta.

Para un país largo y angosto como Chile, transportar electricidad desde donde se genera -principalmente en el extremo sur de la nación o en la costa- hasta donde se necesita en Santiago es un desafío.

For a long, narrow country like Chile, transporting electricity from where it is generated – mainly in the far south or on the coast – to where it is needed in Santiago is a challenge. Connecting new plants to Chile’s main grid, the Central Interconnected System (SIC), means stringing high voltage cables between large transmission towers and obtaining right-of-way permits across waterways and protected areas.

For a couple of entrepreneurs from Wisconsin in their mid-twenties, the offer of US$40,000 to bootstrap for six months in sunny Chile sounded almost too good to be true. But this was exactly what brought Nathan Lustig and Jesse Davis to Chile last year as part of the pilot project of the Start Up Chile program.

Para un par de emprendedores de Wisconsin cerca de los 25 años, la oferta de US$ 40.000 para arrancarse por seis meses al soleado Chile sonaba casi demasiado buena para ser cierta. Pero eso fue exactamente lo que trajo a Nathan Lustig y Jesse Davis a Chile el año pasado como parte del proyecto piloto del programa Start Up Chile.

The day started at the La Moneda presidential palace with a disappointment when the promised breakfast turned out to be just coffee and a cookie.

El día comenzó en el palacio presidencial La Moneda con una decepción cuando el prometido desayuno resultó ser sólo café y una galleta.