Three Colombian companies selected to host MIT Sloan Global Entrepreneurship Lab projects

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

Cambridge, Mass., January 15, 2020— They are three Colombian companies poised to expand locally and globally and are interested in exploring how best to take that next significant step. Now, Imaginamos, Vueltap and Zinobe 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 in Colombia 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 650 projects at 482 startups in emerging and frontier markets in more than 50 countries. To date, approximately 20 G-Lab projects have been hosted in startups and companies across Colombia.

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

Imaginamos, a technological consulting firm headquartered in Bogotá, guides clients in strategic business planning, technological development, ICT development, and digital growth. MIT Sloan students will be working on new market entry and strategic growth strategies around three new services: The Imaginamos Startup Campus, Imaginamos Technology Boost, and Imaginamos Academy.

Vueltap is a shipping, logistics and express courier based in Bogotá, with operations in Medellin and Cali, that provides messengers available throughout the city to make clients’ deliveries at the best price possible through its web and mobile platforms. With Vueltap’s rapid expansion across Colombia, MIT students will be working on expansion strategies along with pricing and optimizing control of inventories and fulfillment times in their new Dark Stores, which are fulfillment center allies to blue chip companies with warehouses outside of Bogotá.

Zinobe is a data driven fintech company based in Bogota, Colombia. The company delivers credit and payment solutions for underserved segments in the consumer and small business markets. The company is developing an app-based credit card product for the consumer market. The MIT Sloan students will work on benchmarking, marketing strategy and product development for this new product.

Action Learning

“Across Colombia, 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.