Guy Diedrich, Cisco’s SVP and Global Innovation Officer, has spent 35 years in and around education. He tells you this not as a credential but as context: he helped build a primary school in Austin, spent a decade as a university vice-chancellor, and has, by his own account, seen enough educational institutions to know what makes one unusual. When he first visited H-Farm, a 51-hectare campus in the Venetian countryside founded by entrepreneur Riccardo Donadon, he was there for a technology partnership announcement. His immediate instinct was that he wanted his granddaughter to go there. That detail is the tell.
H-Farm is not easy to describe without sounding like you’re overselling it. It began in 2005 when Donadon, who had sold a successful Italian web agency and spent a year doing what he actually loved, which was gardening and farming, bought the property next door to his garden in the Treviso countryside and launched what became one of the first startup incubators in the world. Depop, which sold to Etsy for $1.6 billion in 2021, came out of it. Over the following decade and a half, Donadon expanded the campus into a full K-through-18 international school offering the International Baccalaureate, a university programme in partnership with Ca’ Foscari, and a corporate innovation hub where Cisco, Vodafone, LG, and LVMH have all worked. The campus now spans eight buildings and can accommodate 2,000 resident students. There are basketball courts, a skate park, football grounds, gardens, and goats. There is a large auditorium where students pack in voluntarily to discuss AI. Richard Rogers designed one of the buildings after seeing the master plan at the Venice Biennale and asking to be involved.
The model Donadon built is the part that interests Diedrich, and it’s the part worth understanding before getting to what any of it might mean for Africa. H-Farm splits the day structurally. Mornings are academic. Afternoons are mandatory outdoor activity, whatever form each student chooses. Not elective, not encouraged, mandatory. Students cultivate gardens, play sport, build things, pursue whatever physical engagement matches their interest. All academic work is completed during school hours. There is no homework. The evenings are social. The curriculum is project-based. Students who graduate get placed at universities of their choice. Families have relocated to the Treviso region specifically to enrol their children at H-Farm. Donadon’s son Tobia, who went through H-Farm from kindergarten to graduation, is currently interning in Diedrich’s office in Austin. Diedrich describes him as hyperbright, and notes, not incidentally, that he’s a product of the programme.
Before going any further, the obvious question is what H-Farm’s outcomes actually prove. Elite private institutions the world over produce strong graduate placements, and a significant body of research suggests that a meaningful share of those outcomes reflects the students and families who self-select into them rather than anything the institution is specifically doing. The students who attend a €25,000-a-year boarding school in rural Italy are not a representative sample of learners. They arrive motivated, financially supported, and surrounded by peers whose families have made an explicit and expensive commitment to their education. Crediting the no-homework policy or the mandatory afternoon outdoors with their outcomes requires controlling for all of that, which a university placement record can’t do.
The research on project-based learning, which is H-Farm’s central pedagogical commitment, is more encouraging than that scepticism alone would suggest. Gold-standard studies involving more than 6,000 students across 114 schools found that well-implemented project-based learning outperformed traditional instruction not just for high-achieving students but across grade levels, racial groups, and socioeconomic backgrounds. The effect held in low-income schools. That doesn’t mean the pedagogy works everywhere under all conditions, and the quality of implementation matters enormously. But it does mean that the H-Farm model isn’t simply laundering selection effect into a pedagogical claim. There’s something to the underlying approach that functions independently of who the students are.
What Donadon built, in other words, is a place where a genuinely effective pedagogical model is operating under exceptionally favourable conditions. The €25,000 tuition isn’t what makes the model work. It’s what makes the conditions possible: the instructor quality, the physical space, the peer cohort, the boarding culture, the latitude for students to spend their afternoons doing something other than preparing for the next morning’s test. Peel those conditions back and you have a pedagogical approach with a real evidence base. Add them back in and you have H-Farm.
Cisco announced a Networking Academy Centre of Excellence at H-Farm in May 2026, inside the campus’s Connected Intelligence Studio. The partnership will run summer camps built around the Networking Academy curriculum, integrate Cisco’s digital society courses into H-Farm’s IB programme, and host the Bright Minds initiative, which identifies elite EMEA talent for intensive training that Diedrich describes as immersive enough that graduates could be employed at Cisco directly afterward. Bright Minds is a pipeline programme and Diedrich is straightforward about that. The students it targets are, in his words, the best of the best. He doesn’t soften it.
At Cisco Live in Las Vegas, the conversation turned to whether any of this was transferable. The question Diedrich was asked was whether learnings from H-Farm could come to less fortunate contexts, specifically whether elements of it could reach Cisco’s EDGE Centres in Africa, the physical hubs that extend the Networking Academy into mentorship, entrepreneurial support, and business development in communities that look nothing like the Treviso countryside. His answer was yes, and he gave two reasons. The first is that the pedagogy itself doesn’t depend on the physical environment. The logic that learning and joy aren’t competing priorities, that physical activity is cognitively functional rather than a reward for compliance, that removing homework redistributes the learning burden to the hours when support is actually present, none of that requires a skate park and a Richard Rogers building. The second reason is that Donadon is reportedly already in discussions with a UK organisation about expansion, and Diedrich thinks Cape Town or Johannesburg would be an ideal location for an H-Farm equivalent campus. He said it as a personal view rather than a company commitment. It was still the most surprising thing said in the conversation.
The two reasons are worth keeping separate because they lead in different directions. The first, that the pedagogical ideas are portable, is plausible and worth taking seriously. It doesn’t require Donadon’s involvement, or a new campus, or €25,000 in annual tuition. It requires looking honestly at what H-Farm’s model is actually doing, finding the parts that aren’t contingent on exceptional resources, and asking whether those parts could be introduced into the EDGE Centre environment. That’s a design question, and it’s one Cisco is apparently beginning to ask. The second, that an H-Farm campus could come to South Africa, is Donadon’s decision to make and would serve a cohort that, even with the subsidised places H-Farm includes in its intake, would be a small and relatively advantaged slice of South African youth. That’s not an argument against it. It’s a description of what it would and wouldn’t be.
South Africa has its own tradition of wealthy individuals building serious educational infrastructure. The Oppenheimer educational trusts, the Allan Gray Orbis Foundation, the Urban Foundation that Harry Oppenheimer and Anton Rupert established after Soweto, these all represent private capital invested in education with genuine social intent and genuinely complicated legacies. Well-resourced institutions producing excellent outcomes for the students fortunate enough to access them, while the structural conditions that exclude most students remain largely intact. An H-Farm campus in Cape Town would be a remarkable institution. It would also be a familiar kind of remarkable, and South Africa has learned, repeatedly, that remarkable institutions and equitable access are different problems requiring different solutions.
What makes Diedrich’s enthusiasm more interesting than standard corporate education rhetoric is its source. He is not a marketing executive describing a partnership. He is a person who has spent 35 years in and around educational institutions, who helped build a school in Austin and ran a university, who encountered something in the Venetian countryside that he hadn’t seen before and is now thinking about what to do with that encounter. His granddaughter doesn’t come up in the press release. It comes up because he’s genuinely trying to work out what H-Farm is and whether it travels. That process of working it out, in public, in a conversation at a technology conference in Las Vegas, is the most honest thing about the whole story.
Whether H-Farm’s ideas reach the EDGE Centres, whether Donadon builds something in Cape Town, whether the project-based model gets stripped of its expensive preconditions and tested in communities where €25,000 a year is not a variable anyone is working with, none of that is resolved. Diedrich doesn’t promise it will be. He says the process can be placed anywhere, and then he goes back to talking about quantum networking. But the question he was asked, and the way he answered it, suggests that he’s thinking about it in a way that goes beyond the partnership announcement. That’s worth more than the announcement itself.