Thanks for sharing this! It’s inspiring to see such a rigorous approach being applied to the LATAM context. I’d like to highlight a few points that resonated with me:
Language and Expression: As someone who understands English but struggles to express my full potential in a second language, I believe hosting the program in the founders’ native language is a significant advantage for deep strategic thinking.
Early Prototyping: Implementing an early prototype during the incubation is a great idea to prove the proposed value and test assumptions in the real world.
Local Context: Building in one’s own country offers invaluable insights into cultural or systemic factors that can either mitigate or amplify the effect of an intervention.
One minor reflection: while I agree that founders should lead the strategy, I wonder if the profile of a great founder always overlaps with the profile of a researcher. To avoid potential blind spots in either the research quality or the organization’s execution, how do you mitigate this risk?
Regarding the research question: while fellows are making the decisions, they are doing so within a fairly structured methodology (we provide the tools, templates, and step-by-step process). For example, problem selection is guided by specific thresholds (e.g. Only selecting problems that are affecting >600k people or ~6M animals in the first country of implementation), alongside other criteria like depth, breadth, and trajectory of the problem in the region.
Similarly, intervention selection is constrained by requirements such as being evidence-based (e.g. supported by RCTs, meta-analyses, or strong evidence equivalents for animal welfare), proven to be cost-effective in other contexts, and feasible to adapt locally. We also have a (small) research support team helping throughout the process. And of course, we have used the help of certain LLMs (like Elicit and Perplexity).
Additionally, fellows go through theoretical training (e.g. M&E principles) to guide their reasoning, and we have the support from IPA Colombia, who provided lectures and office hours to review parts of the work.
We don’t think this replaces the depth of a trained researcher, but in a resource-constrained setting, it allows for reasonably rigorous, structured decision-making. It also has the advantage of making the reasoning process explicit so if something doesn’t work (as it sometimes happens in the real world, while implementing), fellows can revisit and iterate more effectively.
Always happy to receive feedback on how to improve things!
Hi Verónica,
Thanks for sharing this! It’s inspiring to see such a rigorous approach being applied to the LATAM context. I’d like to highlight a few points that resonated with me:
Language and Expression: As someone who understands English but struggles to express my full potential in a second language, I believe hosting the program in the founders’ native language is a significant advantage for deep strategic thinking.
Early Prototyping: Implementing an early prototype during the incubation is a great idea to prove the proposed value and test assumptions in the real world.
Local Context: Building in one’s own country offers invaluable insights into cultural or systemic factors that can either mitigate or amplify the effect of an intervention.
One minor reflection: while I agree that founders should lead the strategy, I wonder if the profile of a great founder always overlaps with the profile of a researcher. To avoid potential blind spots in either the research quality or the organization’s execution, how do you mitigate this risk?
Excited to see how these 8 organizations grow!
Hi Gabrielle,
Thank you for your thoughtful reflection.
Regarding the research question: while fellows are making the decisions, they are doing so within a fairly structured methodology (we provide the tools, templates, and step-by-step process). For example, problem selection is guided by specific thresholds (e.g. Only selecting problems that are affecting >600k people or ~6M animals in the first country of implementation), alongside other criteria like depth, breadth, and trajectory of the problem in the region.
Similarly, intervention selection is constrained by requirements such as being evidence-based (e.g. supported by RCTs, meta-analyses, or strong evidence equivalents for animal welfare), proven to be cost-effective in other contexts, and feasible to adapt locally. We also have a (small) research support team helping throughout the process. And of course, we have used the help of certain LLMs (like Elicit and Perplexity).
Additionally, fellows go through theoretical training (e.g. M&E principles) to guide their reasoning, and we have the support from IPA Colombia, who provided lectures and office hours to review parts of the work.
We don’t think this replaces the depth of a trained researcher, but in a resource-constrained setting, it allows for reasonably rigorous, structured decision-making. It also has the advantage of making the reasoning process explicit so if something doesn’t work (as it sometimes happens in the real world, while implementing), fellows can revisit and iterate more effectively.
Always happy to receive feedback on how to improve things!