Four Peruvian companies selected to host MIT Sloan Global Entrepreneurship Lab projects

Now in its 20^th year, ‘G-Lab’ helps to promote entrepreneurship across Peru

Cambridge, Mass., January 17, 2020— They are four Peruvian companies poised to expand globally and are interested in exploring how best to take that next significant step. Now, AGP Group, KO Group, Maria Almenara and RIMAC have been selected to host Global Entrepreneurship Laboratory (G-Lab) projects in collaboration with the MIT Sloan School of Management, founder of the international entrepreneurial program. The companies were chosen based on their business models, growth potential, and successes to date.

Teams of MBA students from MIT Sloan—one of the world’s top-ranked business schools—will be working on-site at the companies in Peru throughout January to provide them with high-impact insight and analysis.

This year marks G-Lab’s 20^th anniversary. Since 2000, nearly 2,500 MIT Sloan G-Lab students have worked with host companies on 643 projects at 482 startups in emerging and frontier markets in 54 countries. To date, nearly 20 G-Lab projects have been hosted in startups and companies across Peru.

When determining project scope, host companies draw from a broad spectrum of business challenges such as growth, new market entry, pricing, marketing, benchmarking, fundraising, and financial strategy. G-Lab strongly emphasizes concrete “leave-behinds” as a primary component of the teams’ project deliverables. In the process, the MBA students gain real-world experience in creating, developing and running young enterprises with diverse economic infrastructures as well as thinking about the role of politics, culture, and other non-economic variables.

Meet the Companies

AGP Group is one of the world’s leading specialty glazing manufacturers, with a developed portfolio of products for the automotive, marine, mass transit and security segments. In 2014, AGP launched their newest future-oriented division: AGP eGlass. With a value proposition focused on identifying and responding to modern trends in electrification, connectivity, shared mobility, autonomous driving and performance, eGlass offers solutions tailored for the vehicles of the future. MIT students will be working on a new market entry and strategic growth plans for new technologies of the Group’s eGlass division.

The KO Group has built a successful lifestyle and wellness brand with physical locations in Peru, Chile, and Colombia. They are now looking to enhance their current use of digital technologies and extend their philosophy to places beyond where they are physically located through a digital ‘Wellness University.’ The MIT Sloan G-Lab team is examining how fitness companies leverage digital technologies while outlining a future vision and strategy for their Wellness University.

Maria Almenara is Lima’s first bakery offering fresh homemade desserts – using Maria’s family recipes – at large scale. Maria Almenara currently operates one production center and two stores in Peru, in addition to a B2B line that supplies pastries to some of Peru’s largest food and beverage players. Maria Almenara has built a standardized supply chain and high-capacity production processes, which optimize for costs and time. Its operational excellence has been transferred to a B2C line, which leverages theses efficiencies to serve customers directly through its stores and delivery channel. Maria Almenara has built a B2C model that is ready to scale, and the next goal is to penetrate this segment through additional flagship stores openings and dark kitchen for delivery, in order to consolidate its market share in Peru by 2021 (currently Maria Almenara is ranked on Peru’s most popular delivery app, Rappi). Maria Almenara is working with MIT Sloan students to evolve into a data-driven company, so that Maria Almenara can meet the new challenges of maintaining the high quality and the freshness value of its products.

Rimac, Peru’s largest insurance company, provides life, health, accident, home, travel, retirement and vehicle insurance. It also provides insurance for companies. Over the last three years, Rimac has developed several Artificial Intelligence & Data Analytics models. MIT Sloan students will be working on benchmarking and new market-entry strategies.

Action Learning

“Across Peru, smart people are running good companies and looking to create more good jobs," says MIT Sloan Professor Simon Johnson, the former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund who co-founded the program in 2000. “Over the past twenty years, it has been a privilege – and an education – for our students to find ways to be helpful. Everyone returns to the United States impressed with the energy and intensity of the CEOs in these companies.”

G-Lab—based on the MIT Sloan Entrepreneurship Lab (E-Lab) model launched in 1992—is one of 15 pioneering Action Learning labs available to students at MIT Sloan. While project activities vary, they are united by common themes, including experiential, reflective, and peer learning; faculty mentoring; real-world problem solving; knowledge transfer; and, perhaps unique to MIT Sloan, a student team engagement intended to have a measurable business, which often includes a social impact. These real-time management challenges bring theory to life.

About the MIT Sloan School of Management

The MIT Sloan School of Management, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, is one of the world’s leading academic sources of innovation in management theory and practice. With students from more than 60 countries, it develops effective, innovative, and principled leaders who advance the global economy.