Luis Barros, MBA, MS is a Lecturer, MIT-Sloan Global Economics and Management Group, managing Partner of Leading Business Ventures (LBV), an investment entity and consultancy and director & audit committee member of the ECOWAS Investment Bank (EBID) in Africa.
Barros has degrees from MIT-Sloan (MBA), Penn (MS.Ed), UMASS Amherst-Isenberg (BBA), and is a graduate of Harvard’s Executive Program on Board Governance.
As a practitioner and scholar, his activities focus on working with organizational leaders in strategically utilizing financing instruments, venture education pedagogy, data-driven market insights and innovation “interventions” to enable commercialization, economic impact, digital transformation, ecosystem effectiveness, and value creation.
Barros is an investor, entrepreneur and consultant with over 27 years of experience in science and technology sectors.
As a consultant, Barros concurrently served as venture partner of Portugal Ventures and CoDirector of Innovation and Industry at MIT Portugal. In addition, LBV’s application of multi-disciplinary methodologies and speaking engagements have spanned 34 countries and five continents. This includes or has included serving as senior advisor to Cardinal Health, a Japanese biopharma’s oncology division, and a corporate development, partnering and M&A series featuring MedTech conglomerates. LBV has provided guidance to numerous startups and scale-ups via roles with mentor-based Accelerators and SBIR-funded companies of the NIH, DOD, NSF, and Draper Labs.
Prior to LBV, Barros was on the founding teams which architected and implemented venture funds, such as Massachusetts $1B Life Sciences Center, Lilly Ventures, and IC Sciences (formed by the cofounders of Boston Scientific); and served on compliance staff at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
As a serial-entrepreneur, Barros held leadership roles in early stage venture-backed entities, including an AI-driven interactive bioinformatics company and two acquired by publicly-traded companies. He began his career via successive sales and marketing roles in surgical and clinical pharmacology in blue chip companies., which afforded him experience across numerous therapeutic areas and disease states.