A roundnet company in Utah selling equipment to customers in Germany. A Ghanaian founder turning coconut husks into engineered wood panels and finding his way into European sustainability networks. A Brazilian founder living in Belgium, building an AI platform to help teenagers choose a career.
Three companies, three continents, one graduate program.
That was the through line of “From Utah to the World: How the MBC Program is Scaling a Graduate Entrepreneurship Accelerator Across Continents,” presented by Scott Holley, executive director of the Lassonde Entrepreneur Institute, at the 2026 Global Consortium of Entrepreneurship Centers (GCEC) Global Summit on July 25 at ESPM in São Paulo, Brazil.
The session drew entrepreneurship center leaders wrestling with a question many of them are now facing: what does it actually take to run a U.S.-accredited, degree-granting program outside the United States — and make it work?
Not a study-abroad program
The Master of Business Creation (MBC), housed at the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business, is a hybrid of a graduate degree and a startup accelerator. It admits founders who already have a revenue-generating company and pairs an integrated curriculum with intensive one-on-one mentoring from preceptors and academic facilitators. Since launching in 2019, the program has run 15 cohorts and served more than 300 founder-companies.
Beginning in North America, the MBC expanded to Ghana in partnership with Ensign Global University, and then to Europe with a host partner based in Luxembourg. Founders now enroll across three continents, with Latin America and Asia identified as the next regions under consideration.
Holley’s central argument was that the model travels because the program is deliberately clear about what cannot change and what must.
What stays fixed: accreditation, academic standards, and the 40-item investor due-diligence assessment every founder is measured against, regardless of where they sit. What flexes: curriculum context and examples, delivery format, mentor recruiting, and local administration through a regional host partner.
“The temptation is to either franchise the thing loosely and lose the rigor, or to copy it exactly and lose the local relevance,” Holley said. “The discipline is knowing which is which — and writing it down before you launch.”
Three founders, one network
Holley illustrated the point with founders from each region.
Taylor Sanford of Premier Spike, an MBC North America founder, has built strong organic demand for his roundnet equipment among European customers — a founder whose growth question is now international even though his program was not.
Isaac Brenya of Ecovon, an MBC Africa founder based in Ghana, produces engineered wood panels from agricultural waste such as coconut husks and sugarcane bagasse, offering an alternative to traditional timber without formaldehyde. His work has connected him to European sustainability organizations, including the Bonn-based International Sustainable Chemistry Collaborative Centre.
Adiane Mitidiero of Avance, a Brazilian founder based in Belgium and a member of MBC Europe’s first cohort, is building an AI-powered career guidance platform for teenagers — a case study that landed with particular resonance for a room full of Brazilian hosts.
The point was not that any one company is exceptional, Holley said, but that the network compounds. Founders who came through earlier cohorts become the mentors, customers, and referral sources for the ones behind them — and increasingly, those relationships cross regions.
“The value of the network isn’t visible in year one,” Holley said. “It shows up in year four, when a founder in Accra takes a call from a founder in Salt Lake City because they went through the same program.”
What the room wanted to know
The operational questions came fast: how host-country partnerships are structured, how preceptors are recruited and trained across cultures, how a program navigates cross-border authorization and compliance, and how regional models get to financial sustainability.
Holley also shared the recruiting approach that has proven most effective across all three regions — referrals from current founders and alumni, which now drive a substantial share of the pipeline.
The GCEC Global Summit is an international gathering of university-based entrepreneurship centers. Founded in 1997, GCEC has grown into the leading network for center directors worldwide.
Learn more about the Master of Business Creation at eccles.utah.edu/mbc and about MBC Global at eccles.utah.edu/mbc/global.
