Faculty & Research
Business Solutions for the Global Poor: Creating Social and Economic Value. Edited by V. Kasturi Rangan, John A. Quelch, Gustavo Herrero, and Brooke Barton. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2007. This book brings together a variety of perspectives on how serving the poor can be both a profitable business proposition and help improve the lives of the world's impoverished.
Research Projects
Social enterprise research efforts are comprised of both individual faculty research and case development projects and multi-faculty, interdisciplinary research efforts that often include collaboration efforts with academics throughout Harvard University and around the world.
Recent individual faculty research can be accessed through Published Work. Selected articles and cases can also be found by topic in the Resources by Topic section.
Current multi-faculty research projects include the following:
The Future of Social Enterprise
The Future of Social Enterprise research project considers the confluence of forces that is shaping the field of social enterprise, changing the way that funders, practitioners, scholars, and organizations measure performance. The research project was initiated around the 2008 HBS "Future of Social Enterprise Centennial Colloquium," a day–and–a–half gathering during which nearly 200 HBS alumni and friends examined major cross–cutting themes surrounding the future of social enterprise, including philanthropic funding flows, organizational capacity, and management strategies for impact. Outputs from the colloquium have included, the publication of "The Future of Social Enterprise, Harvard Business School Working Paper," by V. Kasturi Rangan, Herman B. Leonard, and Susan McDonald and an online discussion focused on The Future of Social Enterprise —the Centennial Conversation posed questions surrounding potential future scenarios for the field and how to gauge performance in the social sector.
The Global Poverty Initiative
The Global Poverty Initiative aims to generate and share knowledge about the role that business and business-like approaches can play in alleviating poverty. As part of this initiative, HBS hosted a Conference on Global Poverty: Business Solutions and Approaches in December 2005 that brought together 120 academics and business, nonprofit, and government leaders from around the world to explore the role of business in helping to improve the lives of the nearly 3 billion people who live on less than $2 a day. As a result of this research project, in 2006 the MBA elective course Business at the Base of the Pyramid was launched by professors Michael Chu and Kash Rangan. And in 2007, a volume of the papers presented at the 2005 conference was published, titled Business Solutions for the Global Poor: Creating Social and Economic Value.
Public Education Leadership Project (PELP)
Public Education Leadership Project (PELP), a joint initiative with the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) and Harvard Business School was launched in 2003 with the goal of driving student achievement through improving the leadership and management of complex urban school districts. This collaborative project examines how effective leadership and management practices in the business and nonprofit sectors can be adapted to large urban school districts. Through comprehensive research, development, and delivery of courses and programs along with the dissemination of case-based teaching materials, HGSE and HBS are creating knowledge and frameworks grounded in practice in complex urban systems. Since the launch of the project, the PELP research team has engaged in extensive field research and has written approximately 30 cases and articles. In 2007, the casebook Managing School Districts for High Performance: Cases in Public Education Leadership was published.
