By Lauren Wallace– 10 October 2018

Nearly fifty Executive MBA students from Latin America visited Charlottesville and D.C. for an international partner program with Darden’s Center for Global Initiatives. The students, from PAD School of Management in Lima, Peru and INALDE Business School in Bogotá, Colombia, spent the week learning about entrepreneurship and innovation from a general management perspective through cases and classes led by the faculty team of Raul Chao, Tom Steenburgh, Bobby Parmar and Elena Loutskina. Visits to cultural sites and companies in Charlottesville and in D.C. supplemented the academic content of the week.

While in Charlottesville, the group learned about innovation in history by touring Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and about entrepreneurship in local markets during a visit to North American Sake Brewery. The brewery, which opened in August, is one of the nation’s first sake breweries and is the only sake brewery in Virginia. The program ended on Friday with the day spent in Washington, D.C. Students had time to visit the National Mall in between visits to the Embassy of Peru and 1776, a startup network of incubators in the U.S. northeast. At 1776 DC, the group heard from a panel of entrepreneurs who founded 2Gether International, a nonprofit network for entrepreneurs with disabilities; HelpFirst, a cause-based social commerce platform; and Base Operations, a real-time security and crisis management dashboard for international travel.

See pictures from the visits below!