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, and reinvention, Damon reflects on how businesses can remake the societies they serve.

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 how we respond to it. Whether in moments of crisis or opportunity, boldness allows us to emerge stronger and more purposeful.

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, scaling ideas faster and smarter. In this high-energy conversation, Rem shares how AI can make entrepreneurship more accessible, equitable, and impactful.

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 envisions that this creativity can be deployed to solve intractable problems and improve lives in critically important ways.

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 how this has occurred in the Brazilian Amazon, in Egypt’s densest urban areas, and in the wake of natural disasters around the globe.

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 supplied information, and the culture of the audit firm. We need much more information to know what’s needed about whether compromises are occurring.

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 their members–can lead to governance challenges that are as difficult to address as they were in conventional heritage technologies. We need to get on top of this for AI now so that we can develop the norms and regulations that we need to deploy AI beyond LLMs in ways that make us more collaborative and broadly constructive. Once we do that, we can deploy AI to address our biggest challenges, such as environmental degradation and climate change.

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 beneficiaries of the largesse of social entrepreneurs don’t want competitive advantage, or to win, or to beat their local rivals. Often they want better and deeper communities. Maybe the best way to have social impact is to broaden the basis of community to include shared interests, practices, identities and fates.

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 portfolios of capabilities and build strategies to respond.