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 insight grounded in a soulful understanding of what real people need that was so creative and important that it drove value creation at unprecedented levels.  Sharon talks with Anita about what this creative process involves, how it can be taught, and what AI means for our future.

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, migrant scientists often struggle both in the countries to which they move as well as in their collaborations with peers in their countries of origin.   Building institutions successfully in the home country requires integrity and deep engagement.   Poor implementation can create profound mistrust that lasts for decades.   Science and scientists also face unusually intense political challenges, especially during health emergencies such as COVID-19.  The bottom line:  It takes a lot ofcareful work by committed practitioners to support scientific creativity and insight.   Caroline finds inspiration intheir accomplishments.

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 doctoral student Robert Hill on Texas prisons demonstrates the transformative potential of entrepreneurship training on reducing recidivism by providing newly released persons with unprecedented opportunity.

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.