When serial entrepreneur Martine Rothblatt (founder of Sirius XM) received her seven-year-old daughter’s diagnosis of Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension (PAH), she created United Therapeutics and developed a drug to save her life. When her daughter later needed a lung transplant, Rothblatt decided to take what she saw as the logical next step: manufacturing organs for transplantation. Rothblatt’s entrepreneurial career exemplifies a larger debate around the role of the firm in creating solutions for society’s problems. If companies are uniquely good at innovating, what voice should society have in governing the new technologies that firms create?

How Martine Rothblatt Started a Company to Save Her Daughter

Cold Call distills Harvard Business School's legendary case studies into podcast form. Hosted by Brian Kenny, the podcast airs every two weeks and features Harvard Business School faculty discussing cases they've written and the lessons they impart.

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In 2020, Amazon built a shelter for women and families experiencing houselessness on its campus in Seattle, Washington. The shelter was operated in partnership with a nonprofit organization known as Mary’s Place and was designed to address what had become an urgent problem for Seattle and many other wealthy American cities, where communities were being displaced by a lack of affordable housing. Amazon’s partnership with Mary’s Place was an experiment in addressing this problem at its core, using some of the firm’s own resources to fund living space for unhoused families. But critics argued that Amazon’s apparent charity was misplaced because the company and other tech giants were actually making the problem worse. Instead, they argued, government and nonprofits should solve these societal issues. Harvard Business School professors Debora Spar and Paul Healy explore the role business plays in causing and addressing the larger problem of unhoused communities in American cities in the case, “Hitting Home: Amazon and Mary’s Place.”

Amazon in Seattle: The Role of Business in Causing and Solving a Housing Crisis

Özyeğin Social Investments was founded by Hüsnü Özyeğin, one of Turkey's most successful entrepreneurs, with a focus on education, health, gender equality, rural development, and disaster relief in Turkey. Harvard Business School senior lecturer Christina Wing and Murat Özyeğin (MBA 2003) discuss how the company is a model for making a significant impact across multiple sectors of society through giving and how that legacy can be sustained in the future.

Sustaining a Legacy of Giving in Turkey

In the spring of 2021, Raymond Jefferson (MBA 2000) applied for a job in President Joseph Biden’s administration. Ten years earlier, false allegations had been used to force him to resign from his prior U.S. government position as assistant secretary of labor for veterans’ employment and training in the U.S. Department of Labor. Jefferson filed a federal lawsuit against the U.S. government to clear his name and used his entire life savings to pursue the case for eight years. Why, after such a traumatic and humiliating experience, would Jefferson want to work in government again?

How One Leader Overcame Career-Ending Adversity

Harvard Business School professor Frances Frei and Paul English, one of the most imaginative and successful innovators of his generation, discuss how to tell the difference between a good idea and a bad one, the importance of iteration, and taking a systematic (but fast) approach to developing new ideas.

How to Bring Good Ideas to Life: The Paul English Story

Harvard University aims to be fossil-fuel neutral by 2026 and totally free of fossil fuels by 2050. As part of this goal, the university is trying to decarbonize its supply chain and considers replacing cement with a low-carbon substitute called Pozzotive®, made with post-consumer recycled glass. Harvard Business School professor emeritus Robert Kaplan and assistant professor Shirley Lu discuss the flow of emissions along the supply chain of Harvard University’s construction projects, the different methods of measuring carbon emissions, including the E-liability approach, and the opportunity to leverage blockchain technology to facilitate the flow of comparable and reliable emissions information.

How Martine Rothblatt Started a Company to Save Her Daughter

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