Private Innovation in the Public Interest

Professor Rachelle Sampson has long studied the challenges that executives face to increase short-term earnings by cutting investments with longer-term investments.   After decades of research on technology adoption, alliances, corporate social responsibility, and ESG investing, Rachelle is now thinking as well about the effects of personal consciousness-raising on executive decision-making.  In t...

Professor Shaz Ansari of the Judge Business School at Cambridge University is renowned for his work on institutional logics, cultural frames, and the effects of ArtificialIntelligence on how we think about what’s important.  In this conversation with Anita, he explains how the logics that reflect our identities both shape and are shaped by newframes.   Shaz ties everything together by describing h...

Professor Brent Goldfarb studies big ideas, arguing that short-term investor pressures can cause firms to innovate less than they might otherwise.   Brent also studies how well-intentioned corporate innovators may pull the plug on their work once they achieve results that are good enough to pass muster – even when breakthroughs are just around the corner.  With training in both economics and compu...

Professor Adam Clark of Chapman University is studying something that is notoriously difficult to assess:  the authenticity of an organization’s commitment.  In this powerful conversation, he talks with Anita about whether and how an organization’s authenticity may evolve over time.  Thestakes are high, with firm survival turning on getting authenticity right.

Professor Herman Aguinis is a pre-eminent scholar, educator, and leader in the field of Management.  With more citations, accolades, and leadership responsibilities than just about anyone else in our field, Herman remains lighthearted, optimistic, and incredibly productive.    In this engaging talk, he characterizes research methodologies as tools that must be mastered to achieve the impact to whi...

Professor Felipe Csaszar of the University of Michigan is an eminent scholar with extensive publications on managerialcognition, organizational decision-making, and the ways in which AI is reshaping the process of strategizing.  In this conversation, he explains how the hard-core analytical work of strategizing may be much more effectively done by AI than by human analysts.   Yet in the end, this...

Professor Aparajita Agarwal of INSEAD was a successful executive in consulting and digital tech firm when she decided to step away from her top-flight career and enter into a PhD program in Strategy.  Fast forward fifteen years, and her research now shows how large firms – like those she once advised – cannot succeed by taking for granted that high-powered financial incentives will motivate local...

Professor Hyunjin Kim is at the frontier on understanding how organizations – and particularly entrepreneurial companies – build the capabilities to use AI to improve their performance.   Her research demonstrates that, at this early stage, there’s a great deal of variation even in AI uptake to improve workflows.  But what really excites her is how organizations can be designed from scratch to use...

Professor Mabel Abraham has built her career around understanding how inequality in employment practices getsproduced by people who want to do the right thing but end up with biased outcomes.   Mabel has studied how biasesemerge unintentionally through interactions between individuals, such as evaluators and job candidates; within triads, such as through referrals; and within networks and systems....

Professor Chris Yenkey studies corruption, political violence, misconduct, and bribery.  In this impassioned conversation with Anita, he gives us deep insight into what constitutes corruption, and how it gets produced by people who want things that are important to them.   Chris describes how this problem is changing on a macro level, and what it’s going to take to address corruption at scale.   I...

Professor Deepak Somaya has studied the ways that technologies influence the competitive advantages of firms in one way or another ever since he was an undergraduate in engineering.   As a Professor at the University ofIllinois, his expertise now is in the ways that technology amplifies the strategic importance of employee retention and mobility.  In this conversation, Deepak describes forAnita wh...

Professor Colleen Cunningham studies why and how companies accomplish innovations that benefit the public, such as in pharmaceuticals and alternative energy.  She sees a role for government in clarifying the guardrails on what’s allowed, but that’s not enough to get great outcomes.  It’s also important for government – and for civil society at a broad level – to make sure that the incentives rewar...

In this milestone episode, host Anita McGahan reflects on the key themes explored across the podcast's first 100 episodes,which bring together scholars, practitioners, and policymakers to discuss how private innovation can serve the public good. Complexity and entrenchment — Grand challenges like climate change and inequality are deeply baked into existing systems, making change difficult but...

Professor Barry Finette is a global-health physician who decided as a college student to pursue his passions and to find a career in which he had control over what he did andwhen.    Fast forward to today, and he is a pediatrician, an exited entrepreneur, and a professor with two major appointments and a pioneering impact on the health of children in low-income countries.  In their conversation, A...

Professor DK Kryscynsk i is an expert on how employees bring their unique skills and capabilities into their employment duties in ways that create value for their employers, their customers, their co-workers, and themselves.  In this conversation with Anita, he expresses an almost unbounded optimism about the potential for AI to make our jobs more meaningful and creative.   The way that this will...

Professor Bryan Stroube of the University of Kentucky has studied English, Engineering, and Management – all with a passion for understanding the human experience of interacting with products and services that are available through markets.   In his discussion with Anita, he describeshow he has identified the ways that misfit album tracks, movie themes, and fine-art representations have evoked str...

Professor Bukky Oyedeji is a LEED-certified architect with extensive experience in designing physical workspaces in the UK, the US and Africa.   As a Professor of Strategy, she focuses on the implications of physical space for unlocking our human potential as individuals, in teams, and in our communities   that makes firms flourish in the unlocking of human creativity at all these levels – and tha...

Professor Christiane Bode studies how firms implement social-impact initiatives.   In this far-reaching conversation with Anita, she emphasizes how the field turned from extreme positions – first that companies will not do CSR and then that companies will all do CSR – to a middle ground where the current emphasis is on employee motivation.    In her own research, Christiane has found that there ar...

Professor Michael Leiblein has studied a wide range of subjects over the course of his long and storied career.   Mostrecently, he has examined how uncertainty about the future can lead companies to compete for effective climate technologies.  Broadly, what will it take to structure incentives so that companies invest at scale toward addressing the world’s most pressing problems?   Michael argues...

Professor Arzi Adbi hails from the poorest province of India, Bihar, where he studied assiduously for exams so that he could become an engineer.   After a storied career at Schlumberger, Goldman Sachs, and Loncar Industries, he decided to pursue his passion for long-term impact through a PhD at INSEAD, after which he became a professor at the National University of Singapore.   Arzi’s research is...

Professor Sharon Alvarez transformed the field of entrepreneurship through her early work on Jay Barney showing that entrepreneurship is about creating opportunities much more than about discovering them.  It’s not as though Taylor Swift and Oprah and Jack Ma and Steve Jobs and Elon Musk saw something pre-determined sitting on the side of the road awaiting them.   Rather, each had compelling insig...

Professor Caroline Fry studies how low-and middle-income countries build scientific capabilities, which occurs onescientist at a time.   The successful migration of scientists from low-income countries can create significant benefits for the country from which the migration occurs, but only when institutions in the home environment are designed to make that happen.   Without those institutions, mi...

Professor Isin Guler is a renowned expert on the limitations of venture-capital investing for stimulating entrepreneurship.  Among other problems, inventors from marginalized populations have trouble attracting attention, and yet even when they do, they are often misunderstood and passed by.   Yet entrepreneurship can be profoundly important especially to owner-managers.  Isin’s recent work with d...

Professor Kris Irwin had a fifteen-year career as a management consultant prior to earning her PhD at theUniversity of Alabama.    In this inspired talk, she describes how the individual motivations, situations, and circumstances that shaped individual ambitions drive the outcomes of mergers, acquisitions, and new-firm formation. People cause projects to fail.    She analyzes how leaders develop t...

Professor Jeffrey York is the OG on environmental scholarship in the field of management.   The titles of some of his most recent work suggest optimism about adaptation to the climate crisis:  “How to Make Corporate Sustainability Work…” and “Climate Capitalism.”   That optimism reflects his belief that the barriers to technology adoption are nottechnological.  Rather, they are organizational, cul...