Inspiring Minds seeks to broaden awareness and impact of graduate student research, while enhancing transferable skills. Students were challenged to describe their research, scholarship or creative activity in 150 or fewer words to share with our community.

Growing Digital Equity Through Accessible Blockchain Applications to Grow Low-Tech Spaces

My venture team uses the power of blockchain to empower the real-world economy by leveraging the digital potential of commonly low-tech spaces such as social services, civic engagement, and small-business creation. We do this by creating low-cost mechanisms to generate, promote and sell virtual assets that could serve as records, contracts, or simply signed media. As a social business and laboratory, the team is entering the space and its complementary niches to further the lowering of barriers to understanding cryptocurrency—causing synergies with even more untapped industries in the endeavor of organizational growth in the physical and digital worlds.

Mateo Balmes
MBA candidate, Business Administration
Ivey Business School- Western University

Mateo Balmes is an MBA Candidate at Ivey Business School, where he plans to launch a think tank focused on avant-garde business applications of various technologies such as the Blockchain Kit for nonprofit organizations and other low-tech spaces. He considers his career at the intersection of business, economic development, design, and technology. Among his previous collaborators are S&P, Google, World Wildlife Fund and Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

You can connect with Mateo on his website: http://mateo.digital; and via email: markmbalmes@gmail.com.

View Mateo's work as it appears in the Inspiring Minds Digital Collection: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/inspiringminds/307/