Career Focus

The course is designed for students who are interested in entrepreneurial approaches to the grand challenges of our time. Invariably, these challenges require solutions that beggar the imagination, and that require an embrace of science, with all its excitement and uncertainty. To misquote Peter Thiel, “We wanted flying cars, let’s not be satisfied with 140 characters.”

The course is especially appropriate for would-be entrepreneurs, as well as those interested in the financing and curation of economic activity at the exciting edges of the knowledge frontier. A disproportionate number of cases and materials will take science and technology as one of the starting points of their settings, though no background in STEM is needed.

Educational Objectives

The course develops a framework to understand grand challenges, and to learn from entrepreneurs’ attempts at curating financially viable novel solutions.

Grand Challenges are near-intractable, global problems, that offer the tantalizing prospect that even a partial resolution will dramatically improve some facet of human existence. Success requires individual creativity to break down a problem into constituent manageable parts, coupled with imaginatively catalyzing collective action in society. Entrepreneurs have an important role to play in identifying, developing, and scaling effective discoveries to direct this process.

Typically, mapping the challenge requires understanding mismatches between science and technology on the one hand, and a challenge on the other. The science might not adequately exist in some instances, while in others, it might well have eclipsed available rules to adjudicate its use. In either case, a framework based on identifying institutional voids, or inadequacies in the enabling environment, helps in specifying opportunities and in ‘naming’ problems that might bedevil otherwise well-constructed business plans. Since many of the severest challenges – think climate change and pandemics – disproportionately affect people in infrastructure-compromised settings, this is all the more important. Perhaps six of the world’s eight billion people are affected thus.

The course addresses entrepreneurs working to create public goods to address grand challenges – think of the world vaccine alliance or privacy-friendly biometric identities to target otherwise unidentified populations better – as well as entrepreneurs building for-profit solutions atop these public goods.

Entrepreneurs take a position, facilitate access to the relevant science, construct a capital stack that typically encompasses sources of capital much beyond traditional private equity, build coalitions between organizations, and develop a narrative. This short course is thus organized around managing four dimensions, each of (a) Science (b) Capital (c) Ecosystem and (d) Narrative.

Course Content and Organization

There are six two-hour weekly sessions. Each session comprises either two cases, or a case supplemented by a lecture or insights from a visitor.

The first session is an introduction to Grand Challenges and a self-reflective exercise on what addressing such a challenge means for graduate students in early phases of your careers. The next four sessions address the management of each of the four dimensions listed above. The sixth and final session will be a recap and a discussion of a sample of final class papers, as these will be shaping up by then.

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 managing one of the four dimensions articulated above in the context of a particular Grand Challenge. The final paper, which can be completed individually or in pairs, should outline and begin to develop an entrepreneurial approach to a Grand Challenge.

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