INCAE Making Global Impact
A REGIONAL LEADER: Founded nearly fifty years ago with HBS’s help, INCAE looks to a bright future, building on its role and reputation as a center for business education in Latin America.
Photo Courtesy Incae
As the HBS Global Initiative continues to expand the School’s presence around the world, one of its earliest international ventures, INCAE, the Central American business school, is an established and vibrant institution. As it approaches the fiftieth anniversary of its inception, INCAE is preparing to launch a development campaign, called Illuminate, to support its further growth and continued excellence in the 21st century.
In the early 1960s, at the request of President John F. Kennedy, HBS formed a team headed by a youthful (now professor emeritus) George Lodge to study the feasibility of a Central American school of management. In January 1968, with the backing of regional governments, the local business community, and the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Instituto Centroamericano de Administración de Empresas, located in Managua, Nicaragua, opened its doors to its first MBA students. With a current annual enrollment of some 350 students in its several MBA programs and around 5,000 in its executive education programs, INCAE — which opened a Costa Rica campus in 1984 — has sent thousands of graduates into leadership positions in the private sector as well as to many important government, central bank, and ministerial posts throughout the region and beyond.
Over the years, INCAE has maintained close ties with HBS; its Advisory Committee includes HBS professors, and almost all its presidents and a number of its faculty, past and present, have a Harvard connection. Today, INCAE has been consistently ranked at the very top of business schools in Latin America by regional publications and has gained a global reputation as well, as evidenced by high rankings from the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. This year, the school launched an International Executive MBA program, with modules in China, Spain, and the United States.
In addition to its core MBA programs, an important part of INCAE is its Latin American Center for Competitiveness and Sustainable Development (CLACDS), a pathbreaking, action-oriented research center devoted to issues of economic inclusion, rural-urban transition strategies, energy and water issues, and transformative business (such as entrepreneurial start-ups, microfinance, and tourism). CLACDS is just one aspect of INCAE’s operations that will benefit from the Illuminate campaign, an important initiative for an institution that is, George Lodge observes, “central to the region’s growth and prosperity.”
