Last week, 44 Executive MBA students and staff from the PAD School of Management at the Universidad de Piura in Lima, Peru visited Darden in Charlottesville and D.C. for a fourth annual week-long international partner program hosted by Darden’s Center for Global Initiatives. The program, led by Darden faculty members Raul Chao, Bobby Parmar, Elena Loutskina and Kim Whitler, focused on entrepreneurship and innovation from a general management perspective and incorporated class sessions on marketing, finance, operations and leadership.
The students spent Monday through Thursday in Charlottesville taking classes and participating in local cultural and company visits to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and UVA’s Licensing and Ventures Group (LVG). At LVG, students learned more about research commercialization at UVA from executive director Michael Straightiff and managing director, UVA LVG Seed Fund & New Ventures Bob Creedon.
On Friday, students traveled to UVA Darden DC Metro to meet some of Darden’s own Executive MBA students as well as to hear from CEO and founder Juliana Cordona Mejia about Street Entrepreneurs, an inclusive and community-driven startup accelerator focused on providing educational resources and access to social and economic capital to budding entrepreneurs in the nation’s capital. PAD students also had the opportunity to visit 3M’s newest innovation center located in D.C., where they learned more about 3M’s culture of innovation from host Holly Chapman and VP of Government Affairs Omar Vargas, as well as toured their interactive innovation center displaying some of 3M’s technological achievements in healthcare, transportation, electronics and more.
