Author × AI Hackathon — Querétaro
Universidad Mondragón Mexico opened its doors as host institution for an early iteration of what is now BeNeXT's Author × AI — a hackathon held in Querétaro in November 2025. Mondragón is the Mexican extension of one of the most distinctive higher-education traditions in the world: the Basque cooperative model, where education, industry, and social enterprise are designed to converge rather than compete. Its flagship LEINN program — Leadership, Entrepreneurship and Innovation — is a four-year degree that rotates students through Bilbao, Berlin, and Seoul while they build real entrepreneurial companies in multicultural teams.
Mondragón Mexico hosted the cohort on its Querétaro campus, embedding the Author × AI working sessions inside the institutional architecture of a university built on cooperative-economy principles. The hackathon was an early test of the Author × AI format and benefited directly from Mondragón's experiential-learning posture — a methodology Mondragón has refined across decades of LEINN cohorts working on real ventures rather than case studies.
A foundational host relationship between BeNeXT and Mondragón Mexico. The engagement has continued institutionally: Hector and Mondragón have shared the same stage at the Council of International Schools (CIS) conference in Bogotá on the future of learning, where the Mondragón LEINN methodology was discussed alongside BeNeXT's project-author thesis. Mondragón sits among the small set of institutions BeNeXT positions as an institutional peer rather than a venue.
