Entrepreneurship & innovation

Buying a company is just the beginning. UVA Darden’s Les Alexander and alumni CEOs share what separates post-acquisition success from failure.

How can Virginia’s universities help build a truly unified innovation ecosystem? Delegates at the 2025 Jefferson Innovation Summit identified five key actions to move the Commonwealth closer to that goal.

Five years after publishing, “The Decarbonization Imperative,” UVA Darden’s Mike Lenox and Rebecca Duff check in on some of the technologies highlighted in the book as best positioned to slow climate change. As COP30 convenes in Brazil, policy makers must address the sluggish pace in which decarbonization is happening across all industries.

Large language models (LLMs) offer powerful opportunities for automation, creativity and knowledge access. With 800 million people using ChatGPT alone, LLMs are drastically changing the way we interact and operate as a society. No question, this is one of the biggest disruptions of our lifetime; but is it a good one?

In this episode of the Good Disruption podcast, Mike Lenox and Yael Grushka-Cockayne talk with Mark Hahn (MBA ’20) a career Naval Aviator and previous operations lead for drone start-up company Zipline about the UAV landscape and the pros and cons of using this technology.

The Savannah Bananas have turned baseball upside down with a culture that prizes innovation — and accepts failure. A new case by Darden's Professor Les Alexander explores how owners Jesse and Emily Cole disrupted the sport by building a fans-first brand. What comes next for the Bananas and the modified game of baseball they invented, Banana Ball?

Should entrepreneurship be taught? A new paper co-authored by Darden professor Saras Sarasvathy finds that entrepreneurship education in high school can increase the likelihood that students will start substantial business ventures both right after graduation and later in their careers.

In this episode of the Good Disruption podcast, Mike Lenox and Yael Grushka-Cockayne talk with Dr. Sandhya Chhabra (MBA’17) about the benefits, cautions, and unknowns surrounding GLP-1 medications — the drug that is making headlines and changing lives.

Most novice entrepreneurs think they need outside investment to launch a company. But according to Professor Saras Sarasvathy, the opposite is often true: nearly 80% of companies that go public never raise a dollar of venture capital. The real key to success? Relationships.

Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition (ETA) offers MBAs a path to business ownership. UVA Darden’s Professor Les Alexander breaks down four key funding models — Traditional, Self-Funded, Accelerator and Sponsored — highlighting trade-offs in control, risk and equity.