By: Nadine Hernandez

Carlos Osorio is the oldest of five-siblings, a well-respected educator, engineer and speaker that highlights the best methods to teach and enable innovation. Osorio has been awarded for many achievements such as inventing a private loan program and being the first to have founded the Master in Innovation Program in Latin America. Osorio stated that his main objective is to make an impact from abroad.

Beginning with an invitation as a visiting engineer at the Medialab in MIT from 2001-2002, Osorio engaged with employee personnel who guided him towards the goal of obtaining a Ph.D. with a focus on invention. While discussing the thought process amongst his early endeavor, Osorio briefly pauses and states:

"My curiosity, my question was what is wrong, I mean, what is the "secret sauce" for keeping inventing and innovation [going] once and again and again and again? [...]"

From 2002-2004, Osorio was in the master's program at MIT and soon after obtaining his Ph.D. in 2007, he returned to Chile as a professor at the University of Adolfo Ibañez (UAI).

In Chile, Osorio worked on designing and developing innovation policy and worked closely with students whose developments were shown to Bill Gates. Osorio discovered that he had potentially found his "secret sauce," which Osorio described as him taking what he had learned from MIT. With that, Osorio has held workshops in different parts of the world and later founded the first Master in Innovation in Latin America at UAI.

In 2015, Osorio worked on and co-founded Yuken, an impact research lab that focuses on innovation and design alongside colleague Maria Renard and created a synthetic approach for design, (defi)2.

A year later, Osorio became involved with the Invention and Inclusive Innovation (I3) project at the Lemelson-MIT Program on Education for Invention. In 2019, he officially started to work with the program that is currently in collaboration with Chaffey College; the goal of this program is having interns come together to brainstorm ideas of inventions that can better help assist the community.

In the end, with all of these successes comes the establishment of balance between work, family and individual needs. The question of how Osorio was able to sustain this kind of balance for himself was mentioned and Osorio said, by failing a lot.

In Osorio's Harvard Business paper that was written in Spanish, "El Arte De Fayar" The Art of Failing describes how teams will approach innovation challenges and deal with failure. According to his paper, Osorio describes that some groups view failure as loss of resources; however, Osorio argues that through failure lessons are learned.

He discussed his rigorous schedule and Osorio explained that some humans like to push against the limits, but they more than often push back. Osorio said one option is giving up, and the other option is reflecting what has been learned.

"It is very easy to love what you do, it is very hard to establish boundaries," Osorio added.

Osorio used the example of working, which was not a problem at first, but it became one when overworking resulted in agitation towards his family. To Osorio, that is failure.

Osorio was born and raised in Chile and was a second-generation college student who initially had been motivated by his father. Osorio was determined to change and better lives through the process of invention. Osorio also described certain colleagues throughout his journey as a part of a Marvel-themed universe; some people are unaware of their superpower until someone shows them or brings it out of them.

Osorio encourages diversity within innovation teams because it allows a higher chance of innovation through different perspectives. With the I3 internship program set in place, Osorio hopes that the community will be inspired by Chaffey College's ideas to solve big problems.

Impacting and Teaching Invention and Innovation From Abroad