Private Innovation in the Public Interest

Professor Luiz Mesquita has done it all as a businessperson and a scholar.   He’s a Brazilian who has lived all around the world, including now in Arizona, where he teaches a course on awakening your entrepreneurial mindset.  In this fascinating conversation, he describes the successive deepening over the phases of his career of understanding of what makes businesses contribute to their communities.  His landing point is that the strength of our emotional and social connections is right at the center of what makes an organization great.   And that’s true of multinationals, family firms, governmental agencies, and entrepreneurial organizations around the world.   You build these relationships by doing big things, like traveling the world and starting businesses and trusting people.   Luiz sees greatness in bringing passion to the work you do with your closest friends.

Professor Trevor Young-Hyman is a sociologist and professor of business administration who studies democracy within and about hierarchies.   He is deeply interested in how the sharing of power across a field of stakeholders can benefit organizations despite the short-term coordination and power-sharing consequences.   What he finds in his empirical studies is that organizations overcome the costs over time by learning and adapting, and that residual costs are offset by the benefits of stakeholder investments in the firm.    In the end, decentralizing is not so fragile.   Your stakeholderslearn and interact in ways that support distributed decisions that are remarkably value-creating.

Professor Carol Kulik is renowned for her scholarly research on workplace excellence.  She talks with Anita about how she began her career in thinking about employee-center topics such as job design, employee experience, and motivation.   As her interests turned toward understanding the structures that employees create, and how they benefit the employer as wellas the employee, she began to appreciate just how baked-in structural problems could become.  Her massive body of workon DEI, the gender pay gap, and mature-age workers have led her to a range of insights on the silver linings that arise as stakeholders demand change.   She is now thinking about how AI can be deployed by line managers to reshape jobs to make them even more meaningful for employees and efficient for employers.  But getting this right is not assured.  We need to focus intently to make this happen.

Professor Amisha Miller studies how our prevailing systems for accelerating entrepreneurs and for making investment decisions leads to bad outcomes, like gender disparities and wasted time and heartbreaking refusals.   Our systems arewell-designed, she argues, to support stars.  But what about all the rest of us?  In this interview, she talks with Anita about how difficult it is for entrepreneurs to implement the advice they receive, for example.  At the same time, investors that seek to reduce gender disparities often narrow their attention to so few candidates by category that they can’t discern which candidates may perform best.   There are solutions to these problems, argues Amisha, if you understand them fully.

Professor Britta Glennon is a superstar scholar of innovation who focuses specifically on the role of immigration in the development of important insights.   Among many other accomplishments, she has testified before the US Senateand cited in Congressional testimony. In this talk with Anita, she describes the massively important and central role of immigrants in driving innovation in the U.S., China, andelsewhere.   The knowledge held in the minds of skilled immigrants is so important that, if companies are restrictedin hiring immigrants, they may move their hiring into other countries.  The great risk that comes with restrictive immigration policy is that great innovating countries, including especially the US, fall far behind in areas of critical science.

Professor Tom Lyon has been studying corporate environmentalism for decades, and he thinks that, unambiguously, we’re going backwards.   The blast of greenwashing over the past five to seven years was the result of the tremendous incentives and pressures on companies to respond to ESG investing.  Now that the world has awakened to the fact that very few companies are pure-play environmentalism, what’s now vividly clear is that we need better regulations and public policy to resolve marketfailures in pollution, R&D, and experimentation.   The biggest issue is that the barriers to accomplishing this require political reform particularly in the US, particularly around the role of money in elections and lobbying.  

Professor Michelle Rogan is a pioneer in research on social networks, social impact, and innovation.  In a highly cited paper, she and her co-authors report that companies may more readily retain employees by offering them social-impact project opportunities.  Yet her most recent work with the same collaborators shows that employers may see men who take on social-impact projects as a poor fit for promotion.   In this insightful conversation, Michelle reflects with Anita on how social-impact projects in companies are changing, how networks are changing, and the implications for what we work on together.

Professor Michael Pirson is interested in elevating our sights toward a humanism in management that focuses on enactingancient wisdom in our work with each other.   Why don’t we elevate the intrinsic value of what we create through oursocial systems, communities, services, exchange, and connection with each other.  Let’s tell better stories andcultivate authentic conversations.  Let’s get out of our doom loops and get past limiting our liabilities and stop focusing on domination and exploitation in economic exchange.   You want inspiration?  Michael Pirson has it for you in buckets.

ProfessorValentina Assenova studies entrepreneurship at two levels.  First, she looks at what incubators and accelerators do to support aspiring leaders – all the way from Soweto in South Africa to Silicon Valley.    In this line of work, what she finds isthat developing human potential through exposure to business practices and through the cultivation of funding relationships can make a big difference to startup success across the board, although the nature of that development must reflect the needs of those who enroll.   Second, she examines how the formality of institutions reflects acountry’s overall system for achieving internationally competitive economic activity.   In this line, the findingssupport the idea that every country has its own cultural, social, and economic strengths that can serve as the basis of prosperity.  

Professor Zeke Hernandez was born in Uruguay and then lived in Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Argentina before returning to his home country, only to immigrate again – this time to the United States.    Now a Professor at Wharton, heis an internationally renowned expert on the economic impact of immigration.   His award-winning 2024 book pulls together a lifetime of experience and scholarly study showing thatimmigration creates extraordinary benefits for receiving countries, the largest of which is the United States.    Many ofthe benefits are immediate, but the biggest impact unfolds over a few generations.   Concerned about braindrain, diaspora, social adjustment, and job loss?   Listen to this conversation and your worries will be assuaged.