Playing Grown-Up at KidZania

When Antonio Ribeiro found himself with two restless children in a Portuguese beach town, he did what any desperate parent would do: He went for the leaflet rack in the hotel lobby. There he found a brochure advertising something called KidZania—a sprawling indoor theme park, attached to a Lisbon mall, where children could pretend to be nurses, dentists, runway models, photographers, radio announcers, window cleaners, and countless other professions. And so Ribeiro ventured to KidZania with his 4-year-old twin girls. They burped fake babies in a pretend maternity ward. At a miniature dentist's office, they examined a dummy's teeth. They had a rollicking good time. "The whole concept—to play being an adult—seemed so attractive," says Ribeiro.

This role-playing Xanadu is the brainchild of a childless 47-year-old former private equity guru. An unlikely pioneer of the "edutainment" business, Xavier López Ancona launched KidZania after managing bottling companies and airport suppliers for GE Capital. When a friend asked him to invest in a small chain of day-care centers—where kids would play in make-believe supermarkets, banks, and hospitals—he had an epiphany. "That's where the spark started," recalls López, "Nobody owns role-playing."