John Kennedy Built It For Managers. INCAE’s New President Is Rebuilding The Premier Latin American B-School For Founders

In 1963, in the final year of his presidency, John F. Kennedy asked Harvard to help build a business school in Central America. The goal was development through management: train the region’s leaders, and the rest of the Alliance for Progress would follow. Harvard sent professors. It sent the first graduating classes to Cambridge for their doctorates, then handed the school back to them to run.

More than six decades later, INCAE Business School’s first woman president says that founding mission has not changed. What has changed is what leadership means in a region where a growing share of the school’s most promising students no longer want to manage companies – they want to start them.

“Our mission is the same at its core,” says Camelia Ilie Cardoza, who became president of INCAE in March. “What changed is the geographical scope: from Central America to Latin America to global, in the last 62 years.”

When INCAE was founded in 1964, she says, the binding constraint in the region was the absence of professional management. Today the constraints are different: technology moving faster than institutions can absorb it, climate and social pressures landing on the same balance sheets, and a region that produces enormous talent but loses too much of it to limited access and rising insecurity.

A NEW BASE IN MIAMI

INCAE will open a Corporate Governance and Senior Management Center on Biscayne Boulevard in Miami in March 2027, with nine programs and eleven intakes already scheduled for its first year. The move formalizes a presence the school has held informally for decades. Programs there will be delivered in Spanish – a deliberate choice, Ilie Cardoza says: “We are not going there to develop the USA market but to give Latin American leadership a global platform in its own language.”

The Miami center sits at the top end of what Ilie Cardoza describes as a widening career arc the school now covers. “We accompany a leader from the age of eighteen to the boardroom,” she says. At the other end of that ladder, INCAE is entering undergraduate education for the first time in its 62-year history, launching an integrated Bachelor in Business Administration and Master in Management.

The reasoning tracks back to the region’s own data: access to advanced education is Latin America’s deepest development bottleneck, and Ilie Cardoza argues that waiting until a student is 30 to reach them is waiting too long, since by then many of the decisions that shape a career and a leadership style have already been made.

FROM A CAMPUS TO A SYSTEM

Alongside its residential campus, INCAE has spent the past several years building what Ilie Cardoza calls a second delivery system. Since 2019, an alliance with the online-education platform Emeritus has grown into a permanent second engine for the school: INCAE Online programs and an Online MBA now represent a significant share of the school’s income and, for the master’s degree, a source of international recognition. Digital delivery, she says, lets a boutique school of 40 full-time professors reach more than 8,000 participants a year.

The school has also rebuilt how it evaluates its own graduates, shifting from what students know to what they can do. Programs are now designed and assessed against six competencies: critical thinking, ethical behavior, decision-making, strategic vision, collaborative leadership, and managing complexity. Artificial intelligence and sustainability have become cornerstones of the portfolio as well, running through a renewed Global MBA and into a new Master in Management, Sustainability and Artificial Intelligence launching this October.

Faculty continuity underpins all of it. INCAE’s emeritus professors remain active in the classroom rather than retiring to an honorary role, still teaching, mentoring, assessing coursework, and publishing research. “In most schools, the people who built the institution end up with their names on a wall as recognition for their service, and they are retired,” Ilie Cardoza says. “At INCAE they are still in the classroom.”

ENTREPRENEURSHIP AS A PIPELINE

The GUESSS 2025 Global Report, from the University of St. Gallen, found that 11 of 13 Latin American countries surveyed recorded five-year founder intentions above the global average of 28.3%. Ilie Cardoza reads the finding as encouraging and worrying at once. “Latin America has never lacked entrepreneurial intent,” she says. “What we face is a shortage of infrastructure to convert intention into surviving, employing, scaling companies. Intention and initiative are abundant; conversion and scalability are scarce.”

INCAE has restructured its response accordingly, moving entrepreneurship from a single course into a four-stage pipeline, each stage with its own measurement:

Access. Through the school’s Charles Haimoff Chair, INCAE selected 21 scholars from nine countries in 2025 using criteria built on validated behavioral traits: initiative, opportunity recognition, persistence, risk management, networking ability, and a human and sustainability orientation. “Talent is evenly distributed; capital is not,” Ilie Cardoza says.

Formation. The school’s Entrepreneurship Track, now embedded across the MBA, Online MBA, and its technology master’s program, reached 209 students in 2025, taught using Latin American case studies written by INCAE’s own faculty rather than imported material.

Community. A relaunched Entrepreneurship Club now counts more than 40 active members, supported by alumni-led mentoring and a networking platform the school calls La Junta. “Entrepreneurship happens in community,” Ilie Cardoza says, “and a single conversation can change the trajectory of a venture.”

Acceleration. The INCAE Entrepreneur Award, running for nearly a decade, drew about 200 applications in its most recent cycle and moved 65 ventures through twenty structured sessions in INCAE Labs ahead of a regional final. Cumulative non-repayable funding awarded through the program now exceeds $100,000. “The award is the ceremony,” Ilie Cardoza says. “The capability built is the product.”

What INCAE tracks downstream matters more to her than the funnel numbers themselves: which ventures are still trading after three years, how many jobs they create, whether they adopt technology, whether they diversify into new markets, and how much outside capital they eventually raise. She is also explicit that success looks different depending on where a venture operates. “A financial-inclusion venture means something very different in Panama than it does in an already-inclusive European market,” she says.

A WINNING VENTURE, BUILT ON THAT PIPELINE

That pipeline’s clearest recent proof point is KawsayCore, a venture built by four INCAE MBA students – Samuel Garzón Niño, Andrea García, Sofía Marín Rivera, and Raúl Ulate Sancho. The team developed a biopolymer coating for fertilizer that addresses a problem with real economic and environmental weight: up to 68% of nitrogen fertilizer is lost before a crop can absorb it, a loss that is simultaneously a cost problem for farmers, a water-contamination problem for the watersheds around them, and an emissions problem for the countries that host them.

This month, KawsayCore won the inaugural PRME Students Innovation Studio, organized by the United Nations’ Principles for Responsible Management Education initiative, beating out 38 teams from 21 countries and securing $30,000 in seed funding. The venture is now commercializing in Colombia and expanding trials to additional crops.

“Their project is the essence of what is needed in the developing world: an integrative solution,” Ilie Cardoza says. “It is agronomy, chemistry, economics and public policy inside a single business model, aimed at food security. That is what business education produces when it is done with the mission as its north star.”

MEASURING IMPACT AGAINST THE SOCIAL PROGRESS INDEX

INCAE’s approach to measuring its own impact traces back to a framework the school helped build. The Social Progress Imperative was founded in 2012 by, among others, former INCAE leaders Roberto Artavia and Brizio Biondi-Morra, alongside Harvard’s Michael Porter and MIT’s Scott Stern. Rooted in competitiveness research Porter and INCAE’s faculty began together in the 1990s, the resulting Social Progress Index now measures 171 countries covering more than 97% of the world’s population. INCAE serves as its Latin American regional partner.

The index has also become a mirror for the school’s own priorities. It identifies access to advanced education as Latin America’s single deepest bottleneck, scoring the region 43.22 out of 100 – the lowest of the index’s twelve components.

“That reframes what a business school in this region actually should be,” Ilie Cardoza says. “We are expanding the number of leaders capable of running institutions under inequality, weak public capacity, climate vulnerability and democratic strain. In our region, the classroom is itself a social-progress intervention. Every graduating cohort is a regional asset.”

INCAE holds itself against global comparisons too. A 2025 analysis of schools in the student-led Positive Impact Rating mapped each institution against the social progress and income level of its home country; INCAE sits in the rating’s top “Pioneering” tier, a cluster the analysis found is dominated by schools operating under the most demanding conditions. “I would argue that the mission focused on contributing to sustainable development is what makes the difference,” Ilie Cardoza says.

WOMEN FOUNDERS, BY DESIGN

As INCAE’s first woman president, Ilie Cardoza has made women’s entrepreneurship a deliberate focus, building on her own research in the field. Working with private partners including Mastercard and the PriceSmart Foundation, INCAE runs two programs aimed at women entrepreneurs: Lidera Mujer (“women lead”) and Empresarias Progresando (“women entrepreneurs progressing”).

The programs address a structural barrier as much as a skills gap, she says: many of the women entering the programs do not hold property or business assets in their own names, which cuts them off from credit. INCAE now brings banks and microfinance institutions directly into the classroom, pairing them with participants so lenders can see their sales growth and product diversification firsthand.

“We increase their capacity to scale by giving access to credit,” Ilie Cardoza says. “It takes a village to raise a child – women entrepreneurs have this mindset. They employ their community, their neighbors.”

GOVERNANCE FOR THE LONG RUN

Ilie Cardoza’s other research focus, corporate governance, might seem in tension with training students to move fast as founders. She portrays it instead as a matter of sequencing, one made more explicit now that INCAE’s programs span from an eighteen-year-old’s first undergraduate class to a Miami boardroom.

“We are training them to identify their purpose first,” she says. “Then, in their thirties, we help them see whether they’re going to be an executive or an entrepreneur. Then we help them build their governance system. It’s like being their partner for life.”

Her research points to a common thread among the region’s founders-turned-owners: a need to move from short-term thinking to long-term, and from surrounding themselves with people they trust to surrounding themselves with people who think differently and are willing to disagree with them. If she had to compress INCAE’s current strategic period into a sentence, she says, it would be this: the school is moving from being an institution people attend to one people belong to, across a lifetime and across the region.

Ilie Cardoza returns often to a question posed by the writer Roman Krznaric: are we being good ancestors? It is a standard she applies to the school’s own 62-year run, and to what she hopes it leaves behind.

“Then you think about legacy,” she says. “Being a good ancestor is critical.”

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INCAE AT A GLANCE

• • Founded 1964, following President Kennedy’s 1963 visit to Central America, with faculty from Harvard Business School
  • Campuses: Walter Kissling Gam Campus in Costa Rica; an executive center in Panama; a Corporate Governance and Top Management Center opening in Miami in March 2027
  • Faculty: 40 professors from 16-plus countries, nearly all holding a PhD or DBA
  • Alumni: more than 22,000 in over 60 countries
  • Participants: more than 8,000 annually, representing 30-plus nationalities
  • Accreditation: the Triple Crown (AACSB, EQUIS, AMBA), held by roughly 1% of business schools worldwide, according to AMBA; SACSCOC-accredited since 1994
  • Rankings: #1 Executive MBA in Latin America and #6 international programs worldwide, Financial Times, 2025-2026; 15 consecutive years in the FT rankings; #2 worldwide for carbon-footprint reduction, 2024
  • Positive Impact Rating: Level 5, “Pioneering,” the rating’s top tier
  • Outcomes: 92% of MBA graduates placed within three months; 42% of alumni at C-level or director level; 80% of MBA students voluntarily sign the MBA Oath

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