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 the resilience to persist and even to innovate in the face of uncertainty and complex bureaucratic dynamics.   Despite all the challenges, Kris remains hopeful and optimistic that the higher purposes of leaders can carry firms to achievements that will address grand challenges in the world around us.

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, cultural, and political.  A big obstacle is that the most profitable and entrenched industry in the world – energy generation and distribution – will have to strand assets to move forward.  It is the disruption to profits that is blocking progress.  How can we make change happen?   In the end, we simply have to do it.   It is the existential crisis, he says, that will compel the change we know we have to make.

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 attract investment by startups in new energy generation technologies, but with an intention to support access to electricity at scale to improve lives. These and other paradoxes lie right at the center of fulfilling the potential of technology to deliver value that elevates us all.

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 the market for talent is changing, and the implications of the aging of the workforce in some companies.  Want to know more about changing the world with breakthrough thinking? Sharique can help you look in the right direction. 

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 collectively to the creation of new organizations?    Christina will get you thinking much more deeply about what entrepreneurship involves in our culture. 

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 the ways innovators become known for their Eureka moments. 

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, and governments to become more discerning, efficient, and effective. 

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 markets from within. Lori reflects on how entrepreneurship education is evolving in the age of AI, and how scholars can generalize responsibly from their research. What emerges is a vision of entrepreneurship that’s both more inclusive and more human, grounded in experience, experimentation, and optimism about the next generation of changemakers.

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 what it will take to move from possibility to action, drawing lessons from decades of research on innovation, entrepreneurship, and social movements. 

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 creativity through AI could redefine geopolitics—and influence how nations compete, cooperate, and create for generations to come.