La Victoria Lab’s 10 Year Anniversary and the Innova School’s Goal of Expansion

Published 08/14/2024 in Scholar Travel Stipend

Written by Nina Sawhney | 08/14/2024

Rangga Husnaprawira, the former Chief Product Officer of Indonesia’s GovTech Edu, invited me to join him for a short period of time as he started his new role as Expert-in-Residence at Intercorp Education, working to help the Intercorp Group’s Innova Schools in Lima, Peru.

Hernan Carranza (Carranza, 2017) , the Chief Innovation Officer of Intercorp Education (and formerly Managing Director of La Victoria Lab, the innovation lab of the group), invited Rangga to help with the product development of La Victoria Lab’s new educational products within their Innova Schools. In the process, Rangga invited me to learn more about La Victoria Lab and its mission as they tackle the goal of expanding the Innova Schools across Latin America. 

La Victoria Lab (LVL) is a group of designers, anthropologists, architects, and entrepreneurs that worked alongside IDEO on improving the lives of the Peruvian middle class. Founded in 2014, LVL is the Innovation Lab of Intercorp, an economic group of 35 companies spanning banks, malls, cinemas, schools, health care clinics, and more. Peru is one of South America’s fastest growing economies, with a healthy 6% year-on-year growth from 2007 to 2017. Between 2005 and 2017, the share of poverty fell from 55% to 22%, of its population of 32 million (www.ideo.com, 2024)^[2]. This year (2024) marks the group's 10 year anniversary and a turning point for their educational vertical. After a three month sabbatical, Hernan returned to La Victoria Lab with the goal of focusing on the Innova Schools program, working on the expansion of their curriculum and standards into four other countries: Mexico, Columbia, Ecuador, and Chile.

Rangga was the former Chief Product Officer of GovTech, a technology arm supporting the transformation of Indonesia’s Ministry of Education, Research and Technology. He led a team of 150+ and 5 tribes across product management, design/research, product marketing, content, data analytics/data science, and product strategy/ops. GovTech’s mission was to use technology to improve the lives of teachers, schools, principals, and university students across Indonesia (the world’s 4th largest population). Serving as an expert-in-residence, Rangga is helping the Innova Schools innovation group as they delve into what standards should be applied within their Latin American expansion and how technology is applied in supporting the overall goals of that expansion.

Historically Radical

The creation of the Innova Schools and La Victoria Lab was no coincidence. Intercorp Group’s CEO, Carlos Rodríguez, Pastor Jr., inherited the company in 1995 from his father, a former political exile, who bought one of Peru’s largest banks, Banco Internacional del Peru, from the government. Rodríguez-Pastor wanted to be more than a banker, envisioning a future that uplifted Peru’s middle class and in turn its economy. He encouraged his management team to participate in strategy and built and supported teams of people that eventually served as the initiators of the 35 companies that comprise the current Intercorp conglomerate.^[3]

Addressing an Educational Challenge through the Innova Schools

In addition to supporting the future of his business, Rodríguez-Pastor also felt strongly that Peru’s educational system required change. In 2012, Peru ranked last in the global PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) education ranking.^[4] Rodríguez-Pastor wanted Intercorp to initially partner with IDEO on an iconic solution known as the Innova Schools. It was born out of these four required conditions: (1) it had to be world-class, (2) cost less than $100 per month, (2) needed to be a sustainable business and (4) needed to be scalable. The Innova Schools is an educational institution that offers excellent education at affordable prices for Peruvian, middle-class families. Applying a human-centered design process, Intercorp and IDEO engaged with hundreds of students, teachers, parents, and other stakeholders, exploring their needs and wants, testing new approaches to education, and soliciting their feedback on various aspects of the educational journey.

One of their key findings was that although teachers and leaders are passionate and very well intentioned, they are also very poorly trained and unaware of what good looks like. In order to scale quickly, teachers could not become the ceiling for the quality of education. Something needed to be designed to tackle the issue. What resulted was a technology-enabled model that incorporated platforms such as the Khan Academy and positioned the teachers as facilitators rather than sole lesson providers. Standardization is shared among its teachers using a technology-based Teacher Resource Center (TRC) platform that holds a centralized curriculum with a set of learning sessions designed for the curricular areas at each grade level. The TRC served as a vital piece for development of a blended learning model because the sessions are aligned to specific methodology, enabling teachers to become facilitators of learning and enabling them to scale up quickly with the quality and support of the whole Innova School network. In its early years, tools like the Teacher Resource Center (TRC) allowed teachers entering the system to quickly adopt the Innova School methodology.

Goals to Expand Across Latin America

Innova Schools was initially built with a partnership with IDEO to use design thinking to innovate a school system. Over time it has grown close to 70 schools throughout Peru with a smaller number of schools established outside the country: 10 in Mexico, two in Ecuador and three in Columbia. The schools now support close to 73,000 students with 16,000 total graduates. 86% of its graduates go on to pursue higher education. Now, Intercorp along with Hernan and Rannga have the goal to expand the Innova Schools across Latin America, growing its presence and setting the bar regionally, specifically in Peru, Mexico, Ecuador, Columbia and Chile.

Applying a Design Thinking Approach

Hernan comprised a team of talented problem solvers within his Innovation and Strategy Office (ISO). Taking inspiration from its origination, the innovation team tasked with Innova School’s expansion is applying design thinking methodologies as they tackle this key question:

“How has Innova Schools managed to scale up on a high quality, accessible and self-sustainable education system?”

The team is looking into Innova’s past and looking for patterns and key insights that can be applied to its present Latin America expansion:

What worked well?

What did not?

What aspects of the current system should be reconsidered as the school’s curriculum expands into other countries?

Interviewing the same key stakeholders as before (investors, parents, children, and teachers), the team is taking a focus on the teachers’ needs and finding areas of opportunity and key insights that could be crucial to the success of this project.

Teacher Resource Center at the Center of the Expansion

Some of the challenges the team faces are entrenched processes that carried forward from the evolution of the Innova Schools. For example, the Teacher Research Center (TRC), the platform that helped standardize quality among the Innova Schools’ teachers in its early years, needs to be revitalized.  As the Innova Schools deepen its presence in Ecuador, Colombia, and Chile, it needs a powerful tool that can set the bar regionally for a standardized teaching quality at scale, and ensure the same learning experience. The team wants the Innova School experience in the Amazon city in Peru to be the same as the Innova Schools in Mexico City, for example.

Innova Schools in collaboration with the ISO team are currently working on this challenge, and are designing a revitalization strategy that will help build the future of TRC into a more robust Teacher Operating System enabling Innova teachers to teach better, learn and upskill their competencies, and eventually grow and level up in their careers. This journey of revitalizing TRC technology is exciting as it presents a unique design process where the team tries to balance between meeting teachers where they are (designing technology for less tech savvy users in Latin America) and leapfrogging to the most recent innovation in artificial intelligence to enhance teaching. The discovery that Innova Schools will make in the coming months will certainly help the organization to pave its way for the future growth in the region.