Building an international EdTech company on the IB philosophy

Hugo Wernhoff, CEO and Co-Founder of Kognity, explains how an IB education has shaped his career and how his company is helping students all over the world engage with learning...

I grew up in rural Sweden and followed the IB Diploma Programme at a state school in the nearby town of Linköping. I cannot remember the decision-making process that led me to apply for the IB, other than thinking that having the word “international” in a high school programme sounded cool. And I’m sure it took me well into my first year to learn how to spell or even pronounce “baccalaureate”.

I definitely had no idea that it would change my life. Yet 16 years later, I have co-founded two separate businesses that have both sprung from the IB mentality and schools market.

The IB was challenging for me, as it is for most students. I came into it without knowledge of its format, purpose or requirements. The IB required me not just to learn facts, but to reason around them. I just wasn’t expecting it to be that hard. So a few months in, I had several conversations with my DP Coordinator about dropping out. It was because of the friendships I made in my IB class that I decided to see it through. And I’m glad I did.

Fast-forward to one year into a business studies degree at university, when I met Nicholas, who was also an IB graduate. He explained how tutoring had been his CAS activity (the IB core component of creativity, action and service), and he was now setting up a company based on it. This was the beginning of a long friendship and partnership.

We started diving into the world of learning. We explored how it happened and what resources and approaches we ourselves had lacked when we were in school. Why had we, and our friends, found learning challenging? Why had we been unengaged when studying? What tools had we lacked for understanding the wider picture of our subjects? And, most importantly, what could we now do about it? This firstly led us to form Lanterna, an IB-focused revision course provider. Then, five years ago, we founded Kognity, an intelligent textbook company that we, and many others with us, passionately spend our time on today.

Throughout this incredible – and incredibly hard – journey, we have started to understand how the IB has helped us as people, both personally and professionally. It has expanded our thought horizons, enabling us to reflect on what we want to do, what we should do, and why. We have also started to understand how we can contribute to the IB ethos of improving the world and improving education.

The IB, like any curriculum, is simply a selection from the infinite body of knowledge available to humankind. We believe we can create new ways for students to engage with and learn about this selection, and for teachers to teach about it. By changing the core curriculum resource from a printed textbook to an intelligent, online, data-driven counterpart, we can provide exceptional tools for students and teachers alike in their main day-to-day activity: managing learning processes. These tools include truly interactive learning content, continuous transparency allowing teachers to identify where their students are struggling, and automatically corrected exercises and homework, among other things.

The IB has been the perfect place for us to start, with forward-thinking educators and a strong community. Based on this community and platform, our ambition has grown into what it is now: creating a paradigm shift in the efficacy of learning within the world’s schools, whether IB or non-IB. And we will bring the IB ethos with us as we do this.

Hugo Wernhoff is the CEO and Co-Founder of Kognity, an intelligent textbook provider whose customers include IB and IGCSE schools in over 70 countries. He graduated from the IB Diploma Programme at Katedralskolan i Linköping, Sweden in 2004. Kognity is his second international business with roots in the IB.

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