History

We were born in 2016 after the call of the professor, researcher and ecologist Samuel Scarpato, who managed to bring together an important group of scientists and activists in sustainable development. Brezza Project was formed as a melting pot of three decades of joint work by many of its members. This high-performance team have met in scenarios of scientific research, development of disruptive technological projects, in addition to permanent social, ecological and cultural volunteering, whose products and discussions resulted in various ventures that were consolidated and merged in the last decades.

Many technological innovations that define current markets and derive from various mega trends, such as the circular economy, clean technologies, digitization, the green transition in the economy, social inclusion and participation, were the topics or lines of research two decades ago . For this reason, the Brezza Project proposal does not respond to curiosity but to a process of scientific and professional maturation that unites us as a team.

These are some of the moments in which our members began to develop and apply disruptive projects in areas that are currently trending. These are milestones from which we have deepened and persisted in these topics: management and co-management of vulnerable natural areas (1990), designs of electricity wind turbines (1992), management of research centers in economic and administrative sciences (1992), foundation of environmental NGOs for the production of scientific information related to climate change (Center for Ecological Research and Information, 1993), scientific reports on sustainable local development (1993), high-yield organic farming (1994), creation and expansion of natural areas protected areas (1995), formal use of the concept of sustainable development in faculties of economics (1995), management of cooperatives for local sustainable development (1996), creation of the subject environmental accounting (1997), promotion of the collaborative economy and volunteering as a way to consolidate the community economy (1998).

Expansion of environmental accounting and environmental management to other non-environmental careers and specialties (2002), organizational and productive support to indigenous peoples and communities (2004), use of web 3.0 to improve citizen participation (2006), electronic democracy beyond digital government (2010), digital economy and use of crypto assets (2011), integrative economy (2012), promotion of crowlending and crowdfunding to strengthen the collaborative economy (2013), creative economy or orange economy (2015), smart contracts (2018), NFTs and digital registration of artistic and literary works (2019), promotion of counterintuitive participation models and web 4.0 (2019). Although most of these concepts became a trend in those years, our team has already used it before in various jobs, research, papers, theses or productive projects.

After the death of our colleague and young researcher Roberto Venturini Dinelli in 1992, with whom we spent whole hours designing models of electricity wind turbines with higher rates of “Betz efficiency”, we promised never to stray from the idea of making our ecological concerns viable. We all continued our particular training processes and our environmental volunteering,  along with which we added more wills.

At this point we stop to emphasize that we were concerned by the problems that afflict humanity and their repercussions on a daily basis observed and demonstrated through permanent volunteering, we were also aware of the fact that it was necessary to implement and make possible technological solutions (applicable knowledge), political solutions (constructive participation) and social solutions (organization and citizen responsibility). Thus, we were meshing our scientific trends with the mega trends that were consolidating on the international scene.

Since the early 1990s, apart from profusely discussing the works of Alvin Toffler and other knowledge management visionaries, many of us enthusiastically discussed the environmental policies suggested by experts in the field, such as Professor Arnoldo José Gabaldón, creator and representative of the first environment ministry founded in Latin America and later a friend of an important part of the team. In 1993, Dr. Luis David Morantes (founder of the first ecology chair in medical schools in Latin America) recommended that we formally explore all forms of collaborative economy and deepen cooperativism as a way to link many of our efforts. In 1994, Professor Ramón Pugh (anthropologist, doctor in ecology) proposed us to explore sustainable development as a line of research and action.

Almost at the same time as the Ecological Research and Research Center was created in 1993, we set out to create in 1994 with our colleague Felipe Pérez Andrade (social communicator and graphic creator), a scientific magazine dedicated to the promotion of technological solutions in the main areas of human performance. “Soluciones”, “Vital”, “Soluciones vitales” were the first names we discussed for this scientific undertaking that we did in an artisanal way and motivated by the massification of the internet; we imagined the interconnection of pragmatic solutions to socioeconomic problems through what a decade later began to become popular in the nascent social networks. It was the professor and economist Concetta Esposito de Díaz, an expert in technology management and founder of various scientific journals and research centers in economics and business sciences, who channeled and brought together a large part of our scientific trends; In that year 1994, she encouraged us to found the Student Cabinet for Scientific Research, which had just been consolidated in one of the universities where we were studying. He also recommended us the following year, 1995, to take the one-year program in Management of cooperatives and agricultural companies, directed by Professor Gustavo Jaimes Suarez, assigned to the Extension and Cooperativism Coordination of our university, whose advice we fully comply with, in addition to attending international scientific events as lecturers in the visionary and disruptive areas that we proposed, with emphasis on the development sustainable.

Whether as university students or as young professionals, since the end of the 1990s, we were all already integrated around technological innovation and cooperation, with a marked bias towards environmental sensitivity and free thinking. In other words, social responsibility and raising awareness in the environments in which we worked were already very important to us. In this way, in the 2000s, when we all practiced our professions and also worked as professors and researchers in important universities, we had also formalized different private and cooperative ventures that linked, as we said, the global mega trends in matters of digitization, ecological transition, circular and collaborative economy.

We were first-hand observers of the explosive phenomenon of political participation in social networks, which we later knew as Web 3.0, in Chile (2006-2011), Venezuela (2008-2014), the United States (2008-2010), Spain (2011-2012), and we understood that digitization and the transition from electronic government to electronic democracy had given us the tools and the stage to start proposing the development of digital platforms in which participation and the collaborative economy would open up the way to the solution of various public problems that we had been addressing through scientific research.

Years of research led us to “Pie of Ideas” (Ideas Cake), a mutual support platform that sought to accelerate crowdfunding and crowdlending through the integrative and collaborative economy, whose project we presented in the state of Connecticut, USA. USA, in 2013 and 2014. Almost immediately, in 2015, we brought together the entire team of professional researchers around what is now the Brezza Project. By this time, we already had specialists in blockchain and cryptocurrencies, orange economy or collaborative economy, digital registries (adding NFTs in 2017), all of which gave strength and more meaning to the consolidated work of so many years in sustainable local development, analysis of public policies and technology management.

In 2016, the statutes of Brezza Project, S.A. were registered, thus giving a formal channel to this society of scientific researchers dedicated to solving public problems through technological management, with the environmental and social sensitivity that today demands a world increasingly conscious and constantly evolving. The word “Brezza” means “Breeze” in the language of Dante and Da Vinci, and suggests fluidity and adaptability in processes, projects and markets, so that our thoughts and actions can provide more efficient responses to increasingly demanding communities. .

Join us in making our world an increasingly prosperous and sustainable home for all.

Dr. Samuel Scarpato-Mejuto

CEO-Founder