Career Focus

Science and technology offer an opportunity to address the most vexing problems of our time. Business process innovations alone will not be enough to ensure access to clean water in the face of climate change, provide urgent medical treatments in remote locales, diffuse novel technologies invented in emerging markets, or investigate the possibilities that space exploration opens up. These Grand Challenges, by their very definition, involve considerable scientific and social uncertainty. Even to experts, they may seem intractable, unapproachable, or too big to solve. They demand creative, novel interventions, and require an ability to imagine and engineer new futures.

Although we often imagine government financing fundamental innovations in these domains, and civil society mobilizing to help scale the fruits of that labor, entrepreneurs have an important role to play in catalyzing scientific discovery, developing business models, and scaling up solutions. The course acknowledges that no one individual, organization, or government can “solve” a Grand Challenge. Instead, an entrepreneur takes a position, facilitates scientific advancement, builds coalitions between organizations, develops a narrative, and encourages a sustained, long-term effort to address a problem of pressing social and scientific need. The emphasis is on creating, rather than merely capturing, value and building an ecosystem of innovation. A conjecture is that both returns and risk are higher than the median entrepreneurial effort, given the urgency and scale of Grand Challenges.

This course is distinguished by taking science and technology as its starting point. Although no background in STEM is expected, students should feel comfortable discussing new technologies and reading popular literature about science.

Educational Objectives

The course is unified by attention to the role business can play in identifying, developing, or scaling novel technological or scientific discoveries motivated toward resolving a Grand Challenge. Four threads run through the discussions each week: (i) managing scientific uncertainty, (ii) managing the capital stack (financing and creating value), (iii) managing the ecosystem, and (iv) managing the narrative.

The introductory session focuses on defining Grand Challenges and identifying business opportunities that address scientific and social uncertainty. The next five sessions focus on particular challenge domains:

• Space exploration
• Water scarcity
• Health and the biosciences revolution
• Energy and its ‘greening’
• Talent and its global misallocation

Each thematic session will engage with the fundamental nature of the challenge (from a scientific or technical perspective) and examine entrepreneurs’ efforts, successful or not, in that domain. For example, the week on water technology may touch upon entrepreneurs building new businesses involving cutting-edge desalination processes , the week on health innovation may look at rapid improvements in gene sequencing and opportunities for personalized medicine, and the week on space exploration will address business models around the increasing problem of space debris. Each session will use a case or two of entrepreneurs working at the frontiers of science and technology (e.g., SpaceX, Gogoro,Moderna, Zymergen), some household names and others less popularly known. The course concludes with a session integrating the seminar content with students’ own career trajectories – what does all this mean for the career trajectories of an aspiring young entrepreneur?

Course Content and Organization

This course is taught in a seminar style and discussions are framed by a notably diverse set of materials. Preparation will require drawing from usual HBS case studies, but equally from book chapters, essays, videos, and research articles in science and technology, economics and political science.

There are seven two hour weekly sessions. Grading is determined by class participation (40%), three short write-ups (30%), and a final paper (30%). Each short (2 page) write-up should discuss a successful or failed attempt at resolving one of the featured Grand Challenges. The final paper, which can be completed individually or in pairs, focuses on an entrepreneurial approach to a Grand Challenge.

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