Private Innovation in the Public Interest

Professor Nur Ahmed studies how frontier technologies like AI, geothermal energy, and quantum computing can improve lives. In AI, for example, a remarkably low number of firms have committed publicly to principles of responsibility, and yet their ambitions are to hire engineers who support principled AI. In geothermal, jurisdictions such as the U.S. states may sustain regulatory ambiguity to attra...

Professor Sharique Hasan is fascinated by the gap between ideas with high potential and their fruition in practice.   In this wide-ranging and clear-thinking conversation, he outlines the core ideas in several of his most recent research projects.  First, he talks about why some scientific ideas get buried, and what it might take for them to become commercialized.   And second, he describes how th...

Professor Christina Lubinski takes the long view as a historian of entrepreneurship.  What she sees is shared achievement, and yet we tend to celebrate the roles of single individuals as iconic of success.  It’s worthwhile to consider whether this is working well.  Don’t we want less disruption, and some sense of stability? And shouldn’t we recognize the many individuals who contribute collectivel...

Professor Michael Bikard studies ideas:  where they come from, who gets credit, whether they get traction, and how we can measure them.  In this fascinating conversation, he takes a long view to describe how history credits innovators for their ideas despite their emergence among communities of scientists.   Michael talks about the high-stakes competition between Darwin and Wallace as iconic of th...

Professor Aseem Kaul began his career by studying what we call “corporate strategy:”  mergers and acquisitions, for example.  No more.  He is now convinced that companies are not equipped to solve truly important problems such as Grand Challenges because solutions require system change beyond their capacity.  What we need now is to reinvent strategy to support community organizations, non-profits,...

Professor Lori Rosenkopf , Vice Dean of Entrepreneurship at the Wharton School, has spent her career expanding how we understand innovation and entrepreneurial leadership. In her new book, Unstoppable Entrepreneurship, she explores pathways to innovation that go beyond the familiar story of disruption, highlighting intrapreneurs, tech commercializers, and alternative investors who are reshaping ma...

Professor Wes Sine is optimistic, deeply, convincingly, contagiously optimistic. After decades of studying the global energy transition, he believes the moment has arrived: we now have the technology, the public support, and the shift in values needed to transform how the world generates and uses energy. The missing piece is political will. In this energizing conversation with Anita, Wes explains...

Professor Nan Jia brings a rare combination of expertise in artificial intelligence, industrial policy, and creativity. A leading scholar of U.S.–China technology strategy, she studies how national choices about data, AI adoption, and innovation policy are already reshaping global industry and power. In this wide-ranging conversation, Nan and Anita explore how the pathways through which we unleash...

Professor Damon Phillips studies how society's structures, beauty, and contradictions shape business and creative expression. In conversation with Anita, he discusses how entrepreneurship can offer pathways to economic independence for formerly incarcerated citizens and how the business of jazz reveals deep, profound truths about markets, creativity, and community. Through re-entry, rhythm, an...

Professor Ranjay Gulati is a renowned scholar of organizational networks and strategic alliances who has recently turned his attention to courage, boldness, and purpose. His newest book, How to Be Bold , explores how individuals and organizations can act decisively in the face of fear and uncertainty. He argues that courage is a choice that can be cultivated by understanding how fear arises and ho...

Professor Rem Koning studies entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School, using experiments, data, and fieldwork to understand how AI can make innovation more inclusive. A pioneer in A/B testing and a global leader in AI for good, he believes AI can change who gets to innovate and who benefits. Instead of further enriching elite investors, AI can help on-the-ground pioneers do more with less, scal...

Professor Phanish Puranam wants AI to make organizations better for humans. As an eminent scholar of organization design, Phanish sees all organizations as places where humans flourish. We are at our best in groups, supported by our communities. This means that we need to use AI to “re-humanize” organizations by deploying the technology to enable our actualization.

Professor Florenta Teodoridis studies what makes scientists more productive and more creative AI, quantum computing, and a range of other tools relieve experts from having to perform tedious tasks. They lower coordination costs and reduce barriers to communication. All this adds up to freeing experts to be more creative by broadening the directions of innovation that they pursue. Florenta envision...

Professor Aline Gatignon is passionate about both solving big problems–such as food insecurity and other Grand Challenges–by making organizations of all types more effective. She's particularly focused on how companies can work with non-governmental organizations like non-profits to innovate more and innovate better. In this fascinating conversation, Aline describes example after example of ho...

Professor Christine Nolder ’s breakthrough research on the mindsets of financial auditors focuses on the extraordinary conflicts of interest between the duty to client service and their duty to sustain independent judgement. What does it take for auditors to do their work effectively? Acting with integrity in this profession depends on a slate of understandings about the role of the auditor, the s...

Professor Lars Frederiksen ’s insights as a scholar of innovation have led him to leadership in the field of technology strategy. What he wants now is to understand how our humanity leads us to actin open-innovation communities, such as the CASP and LegoPage competitions, and on open source development platforms. The incredible diversity of these communities–and the differences in the interests of...

Professor Sophie Bacq has studied social entrepreneurship for twenty years. For the first fifteen, she focused on the social entrepreneur as an individual: whether to take on an initiative; how to fund it; how to succeed. For the past five years, though, Sophie has increasingly focused on what it takes to improve lives on terms that are important to those you are seeking to serve. Often the benefi...

Professor Julian Birkinshaw is a renowned authority on the ambidexterity of incumbent firms that face disruptive innovations. His newest book, co-authored with Pearson’s John Fallon and entitled Resurgence, provides a roadmap for companies in this position. The core message is that AI and other disruptions need not create Kodak moments for large incumbents. Great firms can find strength in their p...

Professor Beth Embry moved through her career deeper and deeper into finding solutions to the problems that give rise to disasters–even those disasters that at first appear to be natural, such as earthquakes and hurricanes. These events become disasters when communities are not prepared to respond to them effective in the immediate, short-term and long-term. There are many layers to what creates a...

Professor Lamar Pierce studies the tension between employee performance and misconduct. High-powered incentives to sell more stuff, for example, can lead salespeople to lower prices or even misreport what they have sold. It is this kind of misconduct (and much worse) that Lamar studies. What does it take to rout this out? Lots and lots of time to get the right people and systems in place, and then...

Professor András Tilcsik studies the dark sides of organizations: discrimination, disasters, crises. His scholarly work demonstrates, for example, that companies must analyze comprehensively where discrimination is arising in their hiring practices if they want to root it out. Adopting a new approach to the recruiting of applications, a go-to improvement, is typically insufficient to address the p...

Professor Andrew Foley thinks of entrepreneurship as a social process rather than as a programmatic exercise. Motivated by his experiences as a Venture for America Fellow in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, Andrew studies why exposure to the classic formulas for successful entrepreneurship often leave the entrepreneur high and dry. Success as he sees it depends on getting the community around...

Professor Jillian Chown studies how physicians make choices that may shape patient outcomes for the rest of the patients’ lives. What she finds is that doctors make core decisions–like whether a baby will be born by C-Section–to a significant degree through the influence of the peers within whom they recently speak. This effect is greater for generalists than for specialists. At the same time, the...

Professor Chris Eaglin studies how small-and medium-sized companies respond to strategic opportunities in low-income countries, and particularly how drivers in the minibus industry of South Africa deal with the pressures they face. Minibuses take a quarter of all South Africans to work each day. While the system is far from perfect, it is critical to the economic health of communities. The commitm...

Professor Keyvan Vakili studies what makes scientists creative. He has done work on governmental policy, team selection, research design, and the balance of specializations that come together to support profound scientific achievements. What Keyvan lands on as he reflects on the trajectory of his research program is the idea that AI has been trained to be persuasive rather than scientifically accu...