Entrepreneurial Marketing

CHAPTER 7Converging Creativity and Productivity: From Idea Generation to Capital Optimization

In 2008, Diego A. Cárdenas Landeros founded Bamboocycles in Mexico City. The Bamboocycle is an environmentally friendly bicycle product designed and fabricated using 85% bamboo material. Bamboo is a resistant, sugar cane–shaped root tropical plant.

Cárdenas is an engineer who graduated from the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. At the end of 2007, he started this bamboo bicycle project, at the beginning only as part of a school project.

Cárdenas came up with a cutting‐edge solution. Bamboo absorbs vibrations and is resistant to the fatigue usually experienced by metal materials in general. Carbon fiber is an ultralight material, but it can crack if you hit it hard enough. Bamboo, however, isn´t as easy to break.

On the sustainability side, bamboo produces 30% more oxygen than other trees. When it grows, it is ready to be harvested within three years. Other types of wood take much longer to mature. Staying close to home, Cárdenas found bamboo production could be carried out in southeastern Mexico.

Cárdenas's first model hit the streets in 2010 and attracted a great deal of attention. Soon he organized a weekend workshop to show others how to build a bamboo bicycle. Then he designed a three‐hour Mexico City bamboo bicycle tour.

Through all his efforts, Cárdenas aimed to raise awareness about sustainable transportation and break stereotypes related to car use. According to a report ...