Global Immersion Week experiences across Miami and Silicon Valley, connecting strategy, innovation, and real-world business environments
Global Immersion Weeks at Westfield Business School are designed as intensive multi-day international experiences where academic frameworks are applied directly within real business ecosystems.
The 2026 editions in Miami and Silicon Valley brought together executives and professionals from multiple countries, creating a shared learning experience grounded in real-world exposure, strategic thinking, and global collaboration.
GIW Program Highlights
Miami: 20 participants · 6 countries · 14 companies
Silicon Valley: 59 participants · 7 countries · 43 companies
GIW Miami, USA — Growth, Market & Analytics
The Miami Global Immersion Week focused on how organizations design and execute growth strategies in dynamic, multicultural markets, where customer understanding and data-driven decision-making shape competitive advantage.
The experience was structured around the Delta Model, providing participants with a framework to understand how companies position themselves, build customer-centric strategies, and generate sustainable value.
Throughout the program, participants engaged with real business environments across the city, from financial institutions to innovation hubs such as The Lab Miami. There, they attended the specialized panel ‘From Community to Market: Scaling Innovation through Growth, Data & Entrepreneurship’, where local entrepreneurs shared key insights on scalability and business ecosystems.
Corporate visits to leading organizations like JW Marriott Miami provided direct insight into operational excellence. This session featured a special appearance by Louise Bang, Chief Sales & Marketing Officer for Marriott International CALA and Westfield Business School Global Ambassador, who shared profound insights on growth strategies and global leadership from the perspective of one of the world’s largest hospitality chains
Entrepreneurial perspectives were integrated through interactions with business leaders, including Juan Carlos Fernández, Alumni Westfield, whose experience highlighted the realities of scaling organizations in competitive markets.
Academic sessions at Babson College Miami, led by experts such as Jay Rao and Farbod Farhadi, reinforced how entrepreneurial thinking and responsible analytics enable sustainable growth. These sessions connected strategic frameworks with real decision-making scenarios.
The experiential dimension extended to companies such as Topgolf, where participants analyzed how innovation, customer experience, and business model design converge to create scalable value propositions.
The program also incorporated cultural immersion through experiences such as Wynwood Walls, allowing participants to understand how creativity, identity, and urban transformation influence market dynamics.
The experience concluded at our Westfield Business School campus in the heart of Brickell, Miami’s premier financial district. The week ended with a high-impact session on ‘Leading Innovation and Accountability’, followed by the final presentations of the Global Immersion Challenge.
This closing day provided an integrated reflection on how growth strategies are designed, executed, and sustained within one of the most dynamic business hubs connecting Latin America and the United States, cementing our campus as the home where global leadership and academic excellence meet.”
Global Immersion Week Experience — Miami
GIW Silicon Valley, USA — Innovation Ecosystems
The Silicon Valley Global Immersion Week expanded the experience into one of the most influential innovation ecosystems in the world, focusing on how organizations design scalable business models and lead transformation processes in dynamic environments.
Participants engaged with key organizations that define the ecosystem, including Plug and Play Tech Center, Silicon Valley Bank, Mind the Bridge, and Stanford University, as well as global platforms such as AWS, Google, and LinkedIn.
Sessions led by Rafael de Cárdenas, Head of Academics & Innovation of Westfield Business School and Prisma Group, emphasized the importance of aligning strategy, technology, and market understanding to drive transformation. This perspective was reinforced by experts such as Timothy Stark, who highlighted the role of customer-centricity in enabling growth.
Academic contributions from professors such as Roger Chen explored how organizations manage innovation internally, balancing agility with long-term competitiveness.
The financial and scaling dimension of the ecosystem was addressed through Silicon Valley Bank, while Mind the Bridge provided insight into open innovation and corporate-startup collaboration.
The experience also included exposure to key innovation spaces such as Hacker Dojo, as well as cultural immersion across San Francisco, including Lombard Street, Sausalito, the Golden Gate Bridge, Alamo Square, and the Palace of Fine Arts—highlighting how environment and identity shape one of the world’s most powerful innovation ecosystems.
The experience concluded with sessions led by global leaders such as Poonam Narula and Iris Fujiura, Global Ambassador of Westfield Business School, connecting entrepreneurship, investment, and leadership within innovation-driven environments.
Across five days, participants experienced firsthand how technology, venture capital, academia, and talent interact to create scalable business models and transformative organizations.
Global Immersion Week Experience — Silicon Valley
Conclusion
The Global Immersion Weeks in Miami and Silicon Valley represent two complementary dimensions of leadership development.
Miami focuses on how organizations interpret markets, design growth strategies, and leverage analytics to drive performance. Silicon Valley expands this perspective into how organizations innovate, scale, and transform within complex ecosystems.
Together, these experiences form an integrated learning journey where participants develop the ability to connect strategy, execution, and context in real-world environments—bridging growth and innovation as complementary capabilities for global leadership.
At Westfield Business School, the world becomes the classroom—where growth, innovation, and leadership are not only studied, but experienced.
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