For the next 50 years, INCAE has the challenge and the opportunity to become the global leader on Latin America’s business and sustainable development challenges and one of the institutions driving the global agenda for inclusive sustainable human development in the 21st century.

 

Imagining the world 50 years from now is basically impossible. The disruptive change we have witnessed in the past decade in technology, environmental changes and human interaction tells us that predicting the future is an impossible endeavor. However, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, “The best way to predict your future is to create it”. We aim to prepare leaders that are more concerned with creating a better future for themselves and for others.

 

There are several dimensions on which INCAE is already breaking ground that will be integral components of the school’s second half century.

 

In 2008 we launched the Center for Women’s Leadership as we recognized that the largest opportunity for Latin America—and the world—to increase productivity and well-being is to fully incorporate women not only into the labor force but in the top leadership of public and private institutions and all areas of society. Over the next decades, if we manage to achieve higher stages of human development in Latin America it will be because we manage to capitalize on the greatest untapped source of creativity, ingenuity and change: women.

 

Entering INCAE’s second half century, the school’s leadership has come to the conclusion that educating leaders for the private sector alone is not enough to produce change in our Latin American region where in the past decades the investment in talent for the private sector has vastly outpaced investment in the public sector, leading to weak governments without an effective management of our society. In 2009 we made a commitment to contribute over the next decades to creating a new generation of public leaders that can craft a vision for their societies and that can effectively lead institutions and governments to make that vision a reality.

 

For half a century, INCAE has educated and transformed leaders for the private sector who hold key positions in companies and institutions in Latin America and beyond. It is clear now, however, that improving the competitiveness of the existing productive sector will not be enough to address the challenges of human development and environmental sustainability. The world—and in particular our region—needs a new breed of entrepreneurs that create sustainable jobs and social change through all forms of new ventures: for-profit companies, social businesses, NGOs, joint ventures, public-private partnerships and so on. For Latin America’s bright potential to be realized we need all these endeavors to be more regional with a global perspective. INCAE should be at the vortex of such dynamic creation of the future.

 

INCAE is celebrating its 50th anniversary in the midst of the most profound challenge for the institution of the business enterprise and capitalism in general. Any sensible thinker understands nowadays that the cartoon version of capitalism as unbridled unconstrained markets and creative destruction alone is as utopic as the vision of a benevolent dictator state that through infinite wisdom and central planning create happiness for society. The societies of the future need to find the optimal combination of markets, governments, institutions and free individual behavior that can create the future of well-being, sustainability and human dignity to which we all aspire. At the heart of that search is a new generation of businesses that see themselves as crucial components of society, in charge of creating products and services that fulfill human needs in a way that is responsive and responsible to all members of society. Leaders who will create those new businesses are yet to be formed and educated.

 

Jean Baptiste Karr proposed that “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” With all the changes we have been through, in the end the vision for INCAE in the future remains the same as in its birth: to educate and change leaders from Latin America and the world who will be the change we want to see in the world. In order to succeed, we should preserve the emphasis on the human experience of the INCAE education that has created the profound transformation of human beings and bright professionals into effective visionary leaders for this region and the world.