The FIP 2021 was composed of 6 challenges: Integrity and No Corruption, Equal Opportunities, Dialogue and Reconciliation, Environmental Sustainability, Integration and Competitiveness, and Identity and Diversity. 

In this edition, Pamela Carrasco, an eighth semester Marketing student at Universidad del Pacífico (UP), led the team that won the second FIP 2021 challenge: Equal Opportunities: How can we reduce access barriers to quality education to ensure professional development nationwide? 

Pamela said she decided to participate in the festival because she considered it an opportunity to be an agent of change. "I have had a great volunteering experience where I have met dreamer children who have impacted my professional and personal purpose. Contributing to the improvement of education became a commitment and the FIP was the moment to share my passion and creativity, and to propose a solution to a problem in the educational field," she said. 

She also explained that the challenge consisted of developing a business proposal that would transform the Peruvian reality through a significant improvement in education. In addition, she highlighted that the winning proposal had to comply with the following characteristics: 

• Innovative: because it responds to the key needs of the target audience and generates triple value: social, environmental and economic. 

• Impactful: because it is scalable and replicable. With growth potential in the market and with good performance with respect to the SROI (social return on investment) indicator. 

• Viable: because it is technically, legally and financially feasible and has an implementation schedule. 

• Team: because the team has the technical capacity and knowledge to approach implementation in an interdisciplinary manner. 

The project her team presented is called IMHA (as in the Spanish acronym), which comes from the phrase "Imagine, Do It", and consists of a microlearning method through WhatsApp in which chatbots will be used to automate the process and follow-up, in order to motivate further learning. 

"IMHA has specialists in the different areas to model learning, making it practical, useful and fun. Our goal is to bring learning to young people who want to improve themselves, but who do not have enough resources. We want to guarantee that our users have access to an education that is applicable to their context and possibilities and that helps them to develop their skills for their insertion into the labor market," she stressed. 

In this sense, she explained that the project works in three simple steps: register, choose the category and course, and learn via WhatsApp with a microlearning method that lasts 30 minutes in total. 

For Pamela, what set her project apart from others was that her entire team was fully engaged with the problem before going straight to the solution. 

 “Although there are several problems in the field of education, the first phase was based on analyzing the question, investigating, questioning, connecting information and internalizing it. The focus was to understand our target audience's problem: What are they concerned about? What is their reality and environment? How do we solve it? I took the opportunity to share several lessons learned from my professors, which were, without a doubt, key to the creation of the product. That was the difference, adding the motivation to transform society through education that reaches everyone," she concluded. 

How was the Peruvian Innovation Festival born? 

The Peruvian Innovation Festival organized by Inntegra was born from the need to generate real changes and sustainable impact in the Peruvian Bicentennial. Anthony Montalván Bazán, co-founder and Open Innovation Leader at Inntegra, tells us that this effort, which brought together more than 25 organizations, will have a second stage where they will continue to empower and challenge young people to build together the innovative and sustainable Peru of the Bicentennial. 

"Thanks to our network of alliances, in the following months together with the winning teams we will develop their solution proposals in what will be the emergence of six potential startups funded by our Bicentennial Ambassadors Enel, Fundación BBVA, Universidad del Pacífico, Emprende UP, PUCP, Facultad de Ciencias e Ingeniería PUCP, CONCYTEC, Universidad Tecnológica del Perú and Perú 2021. They will also be awarded one-year scholarships to study at Platzi (Latin American online education platform). This is just getting started."