There is an air of wilderness tamed about the campus of the Fundação Dom Cabral, high in the hilly uplands of Minas Gerais state, Brazil. Its post-modern buildings sit at the edge of a man-made lake, in a valley flooded to drive a hydro-electric generating station built by a nearby gold miner. The surrounding hills are almost solid iron ore – one open-cast mine can be seen, and its explosions heard, across the valley – keeping vegetation scrubby (Minas Gerais means, approximately, “mines of all kinds”).

The Fundação Dom Cabral was created in 1976, when it was spun off from the Pontifícia Universidade Católica of Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte, the state capital about half an hour down the road. But its unusual business model and subsequent growth date from the 1990s, when, says Dalton Penedo Sardenberg, head of business partnerships, Brazilian entrepreneurs were facing “the common enemy of market liberalisation”.