“The real problem of humanity is that we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.” - E.O. Wilson

In the last decade, we have seen the development of several new technologies that will change who we are and the way we live. These have the potential to improve health, education, and economic well-being at an unprecedented scale. They also come with the power to create a new society where most people are worse off than they are now. These technologies create unprecedented business opportunities while simultaneously amplifying our best and worst tendencies. They have introduced new categories of global risk that we are not prepared to address. This course examines three transformative technologies—Artificial Intelligence (AI), Blockchain, and Synthetic Biology—that have passed commercial viability and are on track to change the foundations of business and society by 2035.

In November 2022, the introduction of ChatGPT brought the potential and power of Generative AI into public consciousness. Three years later, we live in a world where multiple competing AI models power everything from customer service to drug discovery, and enterprises across industries are integrating AI into their core operations. Business leaders, regulators, and professionals continue to grapple with how this rapidly evolving technology affects their business models and how workers in both creative and professional careers are experiencing its impact on their livelihoods. Governments globally have responded with new regulatory frameworks while still struggling to keep pace with AI's power to disrupt the established order. Venture capitalists have funded thousands of startups using Generative AI. CEOs of leading AI companies have warned that this generation of AI could destroy human society, while others claim it could create global utopia by solving intractable problems like climate change, ending the need for humans to work for a living, and bringing the cost of energy to zero.

The Web3 and crypto markets have also transformed since their initial hype cycle. Leaders like Sam Bankman-Fried - who declared the birth of a new distributed era where our notions of value and money itself would be redefined - were convicted of fraud. Driven by favorable regulations, we are seeing an acceleration in institutional adoption as stablecoins gain legitimacy for payments and treasury management; crypto companies go public; and traditional financial institutions offer blockchain-based services. As blockchain technology becomes embedded in mainstream commerce, crypto assets are increasingly intersecting with traditional finance.

Further in the background, a quiet revolution has been taking place in reengineering life itself. Companies have been using CRISPR-based technologies to reprogram living organisms, promising an unimaginable future where human capabilities could be enhanced; aging could be reversed; new forms of life created; and custom-designed materials grown rather than manufactured.

Furthermore, these three technologies and their separate worlds are converging: AI is designing new proteins for synthetic biology applications; blockchain is providing verification for AI training data and model provenance; and synthetic biology is creating materials for quantum computing systems that will accelerate AI development.

The 3Tech course will give students an understanding of these technologies from the perspective of a business leader, preparing students for a world where technology creates exponential increases in capabilities, forcing business leaders to rethink business models and reassess the commercial and ethical choices they make.

Artificial Intelligence is bringing the cost of cognition to zero, changing the efficiency and scale at which we meet objectives—both positive and negative. We examine foundational companies like Anthropic, DeepMind and OpenAI. We explore how AI transforms business operations across diverse contexts—from early-stage ventures to the world's largest financial services companies (Ant Financial), as well as specialized applications in creative industries (Metaphysic) and healthcare (Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan). The course includes hands-on exercises using AI applications and agents to augment or replace human labor in different functional tasks.

We also examine AI's transformation of society, exploring technology's role in shaping our epistemic commons, personal relationships, political systems, democracy, government services, justice, and military applications. Students explore algorithmic influence on consumer behavior through cases like TikTok; automation of an unemployment benefits system through the MiDAS case; ethical boundaries of AI-human relationships through Replika AI's virtual companion app; and the challenges faced by companies like Palantir as they develop powerful services traditionally provided by national governments.

Blockchain is changing our notions of value and money and, with them, the institutions of trust in society. We explore companies using technology-enabled organizations to create new forms of value and ways of organizing action—issuing their own currencies, enabling distributed autonomous governance, creating self-enforcing contracts, and moving the provision of trust from institutions to network protocols with no central authority. This challenges core notions of brand value, scale, regulatory guardrails, hierarchy, and incentives. Cases include Circle Financial’s reimagining of digital money, Art Blocks' redefinition of digital art and artist value capture, Helium Mobile's blockchain-powered crowdsourcing model for telecommunications infrastructure, and NEAR's infrastructure to counter the power of large social networks and algorithmic behavior control.

Synthetic Biology examines how CRISPR gene-editing technology has created new capabilities for engineering living entities at scale. By making DNA programmable, companies are creating a foundation layer for new materials, therapeutic approaches, and new forms of life designed to solve particular problems. We examine companies using engineered biology to eliminate heart disease (Verve Therapeutics), reengineer malaria-transmitting mosquito species through gene drives (Target Malaria), and extend healthspan by "curing the disease of aging" (Rejuvenate Bio).

The course's closing section examines how technological convergence requires redesigning digital society, exploring both utopian possibilities—Taiwan's participative democracy under Audrey Tang, increased wealth and material abundance, extended healthspan—and dystopian risks including large-scale ransomware attacks, autonomous weapons, loss of individual agency, and fascist governance. With appropriate guardrails, these technologies can create decades of abundance, health, and wellness. Without governance, they risk creating inequality and what Yuval Noah Harari calls "digital colonialism" and "useless humans."

Students develop frameworks for evaluating emerging technologies and their business implications, understanding interdependencies between AI, blockchain, and synthetic biology rather than viewing them in isolation. The course also examines feeder technologies including ubiquitous networks that collect data on all our actions, computing models orders of magnitude faster than current systems, and brain-computer interfaces that enable cognitive augmentation. Ultimately, the course equips students to engage with organizations building and using these technologies, enabling them to consider new business models, governance approaches, and the role of business leaders in creating companies that enhance societal value while earning returns for shareholders.

The course serves MBA students seeking to lead in technology-transformed markets and attracts significant cross-registration from Harvard Medical School, MIT Sloan, and Harvard Kennedy School, creating classroom discussions that blend business strategy with ethics, public policy, and technical perspectives.

Course Format

Approximately 60% of class sessions are case-based, and 60% of sessions feature industry experts and case protagonists. There are a few lecture/Q&A sessions to explain the core concepts and mechanics of the three technologies. Students complete a final project in lieu of an exam.

Overview:

This is a build-heavy operator workshop where you will spend most of your time deploying real marketing assets, campaigns, and AI workflows, then validating them with data. You will use LLMs to run an end-to-end go-to-market test cycle: define a target customer, craft positioning and creative, launch channel tests across SEO/GEO, paid search/social, influencer, and owned media, and read results to decide what to scale vs. stop. Expect fast demos, hands-on build time every class, and weekly deliverables that compound into a working toolkit you can deploy the day you leave. The course operates at the AI and digital marketing frontier, where answers are not pre-packaged, tools change weekly, and ambiguity is the baseline condition. Students who need a clean framework handed to them will find this frustrating. However, students who are curious, adaptive, and want to build their way to clarity will thrive. If you are looking to debate about "AI strategy," this is the wrong course. The class rewards practitioners who want to work directly with modern tools and learn from guests at companies including OpenAI, Meta, Adobe, HubSpot, and Semrush.

Career Focus:

Built for students who intend to run modern growth and customer acquisition operations, not just oversee them. Relevant for students pursuing marketing, growth, product, e-commerce, brand, and revenue leadership roles, as well as founders building lean AI-native go-to-market teams and operators joining startups or established firms where they will be expected to deploy and manage agentic systems from day one. The unifying thread is operational ownership: you will be the person responsible for what ships, what gets measured, and what gets cut. The course rewards intellectual curiosity and a bias toward action over analysis paralysis. The students who extract the most value are those who show up willing to experiment, iterate, and build under uncertainty. Alumni of prior iterations have called it immediately applicable citing real tools, real outputs, and direct access to senior practitioners from industry.

Educational Objectives:

Students will develop an operator's mindset for running a complete AI-powered go-to-market system. That means two layers of mastery. First, the executional layer: using LLMs and modern GenAI tooling to research and define a target customer, build positioning and messaging, produce creative, launch and test campaigns across channels, and interpret performance data to make clear scale vs. stop decisions. Second, the agentic layer: learning to architect a fleet of specialized marketing agents, define their roles and task boundaries, identify the data infrastructure each agent requires to function, and build the human-in-the-loop checkpoints that keep the system accountable. Students leave with reusable outputs including a channel plan, creative variants, influencer outreach package, paid media test plan, analytics dashboard, and a set of deployable custom agents, plus documented workflows and playbooks ready for immediate application.

Most importantly, student leave with the mindset of working in this AI age of curiosity, experimentation and skepticism.

Course Content and Organization:

Each class follows a consistent cadence: short lecture, live demo, hands-on build time, debrief. Modules progress through the full digital growth stack and the agentic layer running beneath it: (1) AI-first marketing mindset, agentic architecture fundamentals, and funnel metrics, (2) customer research, ICP definition, and segmentation agents, (3) positioning, messaging, and creative generation workflows, (4) SEO, GEO, and content pipeline systems, (5) paid search and paid social testing with performance monitoring agents, (6) influencer and creator outreach at scale, (7) owned media, lifecycle, and retention systems, (8) analytics, experimentation, and agent-assisted decision-making, culminating in a capstone go-to-market test plan and live performance readout that demonstrates the full stack operating together. Practitioner guests join throughout the arc as active contributors to build sessions, not one-off speakers.

Grading / Course Administration:

Grading emphasizes execution and iteration over polish. Credit is earned through consistent preparation, active participation in hands-on build sessions, and completion of weekly operator outputs that accumulate into the final capstone. Participation expectations are explicit: show up prepared, contribute during build and debrief sessions, and bring your current drafts and builds to class. Work in progress is the expected state, not the exception.

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved

Overview:

Advanced Competitive Strategy builds on the insights of the RC Strategy course to expand beyond it, in both depth and breadth, with a particular focus on competitive advantage and dynamics.

Career Focus:

This course is designed for future executives and investors for whom assessing or developing business strategies will be critical, and who therefore need advanced strategy skills and insights.

Educational Objectives:

The purpose of ‘Advanced Competitive Strategy’ is to give you advanced business strategy skills and insights. The course expands beyond the RC Strategy course in three directions:

• A more systematic perspective on the structure of competitive advantage and performance: a fully integrated framework on the sources of advantage, in-depth insights into specific sources of advantage, appropriate performance measures for strategy decisions, and tests for the effectiveness of a strategy.

• Additional sources of advantage beyond the ‘value creation/margin’ focus of RC strategy: advantage from size (rather than margin) through scaling and growth; advantage from ‘value capture’ (rather than ‘value creation’) through superior pricing or bargaining position; advantage rooted in superior information or intelligence or in culture, …

• A more dynamic perspective: how companies create and grow advantage over time; dynamic properties of advantage; organic growth modes and paths; advanced competitive dynamics; and failure and strategic change.

In the process, the course also aims to further sharpen some skills from the RC course, such as relative cost analysis, by giving insight into common mistakes and the right use of such tools.

Finally, the course includes an extensive hands-on simulation – running over multiple classes – where you will manage a company over time in a dynamic environment, facing tough competitors.

(The course was previously called ‘Creating and Sustaining Competitive Advantage’ but renamed to reflect the broadening focus.)

Grading / Course Administration:

Student evaluation will be based on class participation (40%), simulation preparation and reflection (10%), and a final exam (50%). Instead of the final exam, students can also choose to do a project on a company of their choice.

Course Content Keywords:

Strategy, competitive advantage, value capture, sources of advantage, business simulation, scale, competition, organic growth, strategy change.

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved

Requirements: Active, insightful class and negotiation exercise participation; paper or take-home final exam.

This course serves both as a sophisticated follow-on to basic negotiation courses and/or as a self-contained negotiation course taught at an advanced level with a heavy emphasis on handling challenging real-world cases. Unlike past versions of this course, there is no formal pre- or co-requisite, although an introductory negotiation course at one of Harvard’s professional schools or equivalent elsewhere will be beneficial and will offer more basic skill-building exercises. Those without prior negotiation coursework should read 3D Negotiation by Lax and Sebenius in its entirety before class begins to become familiar with key concepts and terminology that others who have taken an earlier negotiation course will already bring to the course.

Purpose: Take your negotiating ability to the next level by matching wits with some of the world’s greatest dealmakers and diplomats as they work through their toughest deals. Examples:

• In business and finance: Steve Schwarzman on several early make-or-break deals for Blackstone; Sarah Frey negotiates advantageous supplier deals for her tiny farm with a vindictive Walmart enroute to building an agricultural empire; Bruce Wasserstein negotiates to take Lazard public, etc.

• In diplomacy: Christiana Figueres guides the Paris climate talks to a near-unanimous agreement in 2015; Colombian President Juan Santos ends a 50-year civil war with the FARC guerillas; US Trade Negotiator Charlene Barshefsky takes on IP negotiations with China; former US Secretaries of State Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Hillary Clinton describe critical moments in their negotiations with Vladimir Putin, etc.
  
  
• In the arts and sports: Music industry lawyer John Branca negotiates the purchase of the Beatles catalog; Artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude negotiate with endless opponents to build “Running Fence,” The Gates in Central Park, and to wrap Paris’s Pont Neuf in golden fabric; Proponents of a “European Super League” try to form a breakaway football/soccer league, etc. etc.
  
  

A typical case challenges you to address its critical deal moments. For most cases in the course, we watch excerpts from stop action video interviews, mostly that I’ve conducted with the protagonist(s) describing how they handled a series of key decisions. After discussion of each such decision, we move to the next critical moment, and so on . . . after which we draw broader lessons. We often find that insights from private sector dealmaking inform public and not-for-profit sector negotiations and vice versa.

The objective of this approach is to extract highly practical lessons from studying the world’s greatest negotiators at work on their most challenging deals—in business, finance, diplomacy, the not-for-profit world, and across sectors. Since 2001, the Program on Negotiation—an interuniversity consortium involving Harvard, MIT, and Tufts—has regularly bestowed the “Great Negotiator Award” on men and women from around the world who have consistently overcome formidable barriers to achieve truly worthwhile purposes. In a closely related project at Harvard, faculty have conducted detailed interviews with former American Secretaries of State—Henry Kissinger, George Shultz James A. Baker, III, Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and Rex Tillerson—about their most difficult negotiations. As chair of the Great Negotiators Award program and co-chair of the American Secretaries of State initiative, I am deeply involved in a multi-year project to systematically distill the strategies and tactics of this distinguished group (along with several other remarkable negotiators). The emerging findings of this ongoing project will heavily inform this course. By way of highly interactive case discussions, frequently interspersed with video clips of the protagonists, and a few negotiation exercises—although considerably fewer such simulations relative to many introductory negotiation courses—Advanced Negotiation will develop valuable lessons and skills for dealmaking and dispute resolution that go well beyond those offered in basic courses.

Career Focus

This course is designed for students who expect to analyze and participate effectively in challenging business, financial, diplomatic, and not-for-profit negotiations, often with public-private and cross-border aspects. Of the cases, exercises, videos, and significant examples in the course, roughly a third could be classified in a mainly business/financial/entrepreneurial category, a third could be classified in a mainly public/diplomatic/not-for-profit category, and a third would involve a mixture of private, public and/or not-for-profit parties that played meaningful roles.

Course Content and Organization

Throughout this course, a central theme is how to deal with difficult negotiators and genuinely hard negotiations in many different settings. Different aspects of meeting this challenge will be developed. One focus will be on "at-the-table" tactics for handling hardball moves, incompatible positions, adversarial relationships, ideological differences, the lack of vital information, and cross-cultural frictions. A second thread explores how sophisticated deal design moves can overcome impasses in order to create maximum value on a sustainable basis. A third consistent emphasis develops advanced concepts and skills for making effective "away-from-the-table" setup moves, especially to meet the challenges of cross-border negotiations and those that play out over time. Such challenges typically occur both "across the table" in negotiating "externally" with the other side(s) as well as "internally" within each side. Beyond doing individual deals, the course will explore how great negotiators often envision and carry out effective multi-front, sequential “negotiation campaigns” that culminate in achieving a target deal or deals with sufficient support for implementation and sustainability. Specific course modules that develop the above concepts include 1) introduction and course themes, 2) creating and claiming value, 3) preparing for tough negotiations, 4) dealing effectively with hard bargainers, 5) Two-level games/internal and external negotiations, and 6) Multiparty negotiations across borders and over times.

Course Requirements

Beyond constructive participation in class and faithfully preparing for and carrying out negotiation exercises, most students will opt for a self-scheduled written exam. Instead of taking a final exam, some students may prefer to write a paper on the kind of negotiation about which you care intensely or about a “great negotiator” whom you wish to study in depth. Since, inevitably, the class sessions won’t cover your specific areas of greatest interest in the kind of depth you might wish, the paper option provides the chance to do so for yourself and to build personally relevant intellectual capital. The major criterion for the paper is that it treats your topic in a sophisticated manner from a negotiation-analytic standpoint, and that it teaches you and me something significant about effective dealmaking.

Important: If you are interested in cross-registering for this course, it is imperative that you follow the HBS process, especially its timetable, which can be found here.

Course Content Keywords:

Negotiation, Dealmaking, Bargaining, Conflict Resolution, "Handling Hard Bargainers"

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Overview:

We are in the golden age of fraud. Learning how to detect and prevent fraud, and make better investment decisions, has broad applicability for people joining or running companies, as well as private and public market investors.

Career Focus:

The course is relevant for students seeking to develop sophisticated financial analysis skills to spot red flags in their investment portfolios and better prepares them for careers in hedge funds, investment banking, or private equity. The course is also relevant for future leaders, as they develop expertise to understand financial reporting implications of business decisions and identify key control fault-lines in companies that can lead to fraud.

Educational Objectives:

This course examines the most sensational global frauds of this millennium with the following goals in mind:

• To learn the strategies used in executing the fraud;

• To understand how the fraud unraveled;

• To spot financial and non-financial “red flags” that should have alerted investors;

The course features prominent speakers involved in the frauds, including executives, short sellers, investigative journalists and whistleblowers.

Course Content and Organization:

The course consists of three modules focusing on classic scandals, contemporary controversies, and team project work.

Grading / Course Administration:

Course grades will be based on class participation (50%) and a final project (50%).

Course Content Keywords:

Financial analysis; corporate governance; accounting fraud; corporate red flags; short selling; investment decisions.

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved

---Please Read Before Enrolling---

My goal: to create and deliver a valuable and extraordinary learning experience for all who choose to accept the challenge. To help determine if this challenge is for you:

• Attendance, including being on time and staying for the full session, is crucial. If you anticipate conflicts, please do not enroll.
• Note that speeches begin in class #2.
• This is not a class to assume that starting with strong speaking skills and coasting is an easy road to a 1.
• This class is for those ready to receive feedback. This may include feedback about your ideas, your presence (including posture), and more.

Career Focus

Exceptionally effective leaders must have the ability to communicate clearly, persuasively, and thoughtfully to diverse audiences.

Skillful communication is essential, even if you don’t plan to be on the front lines or give frequent formal speeches. While this course focuses on public speaking, I designed it to also explore speaking beyond the formal podium: disagreeing with the boss, holding an employee accountable, giving a peer critical feedback, speaking on your feet, influencing someone to change their behavior, resolving conflicts, and more.

This class is for anyone ready to take risks, hungry to receive and apply feedback, and eager to improve the quality of their results and relationships.

Course Objectives

The course’s principal goal is to strengthen your capacity to achieve desired results and influence others, by communicating more effectively and authentically.

This course is highly participatory. Through hands-on activities, exercises, and application, participants interactively build skills in key competencies, including:

• Showing up confidently (improving body language and presence)
• Understanding and applying effective frameworks for structuring your message
• Building trust and credibility
• Discussing topics that are high stakes, controversial, and emotionally charged
• Improving storytelling skills
• Giving and receiving feedback
• Resolving conflict
• Communicating under high stress/crisis communication

Course Outline

The class focuses on building skills around critical aspects of communication. On speech days, students deliver a series of speeches and receive feedback from the instructor and classmates. Speeches are videotaped and posted on the course webpage for later review and reflection (only visible by course participants).

Assignments

1) Speaking Assignments:

• Two in-class speaking assignments of roughly 2-3 minutes. Prior to each assignment, students submit a one sentence headline that summarizes what they plan to say, an outline of the key points/takeaways, the name of the student they practiced with, and two bullet points for what improvement they wish to focus on in their delivery.
• One additional speech that students arrange outside of class on their own that is not a requirement of another class. Options include (but are not limited to): speech at a class event, an HBS MyTake, Toastmaster meeting, fundraising event, presenting an award, wedding toast, local club (Lions Club, Kiwanis, Junior League, etc.), K-12 school, community event, orientation, non-profit, and speaking on a podcast. These speeches can be done in your native language. Credit requires submitting a 30 second video of speaking engagement and a reflection on lessons learned.

2) Feedback/Reflection meeting (after Speech 1):

• Watch video of your first in-class speech within 48 hrs. of delivery, review feedback, and identify what you’d like to improve about your next speech.
• Sign up and attend a one-on-one conference with me to review your speech.
• After the conference, review your previous self- reflection, your professor feedback, and your peer feedback and submit two bullets on what you’ll focus on in your next speech for improving delivery. Due: 24 hours after conference.

3) Next steps video (after Speech 2):

• Review the video of your second speech within 48 hours of delivery.
• Submit a short, 30 second video on your “growing edge” – what you want to improve/focus on going forward. Due: 48 hrs. after speech

4) Tough Conversation:

• Hold a significant conversation with someone you are in conflict with—applying the Crucial Conversation skills you learn in class.
• Write a one-page reflection on how it went, what new skills you used, and what you could do differently next time.

5) Practice:

• Practice your speech with at least one other student prior to each speech. Additional practice sessions.

6) Feedback:

• Provide meaningful feedback to peers following their speeches, throughout the course, and in small groups.

7) Weekly assignments:

• Complete additional weekly assignments.

Grading

Speaking Assignments 45%

Weekly Assignments, Tough Conversation: 25%

Class Engagement: 30%

Class engagement includes a variety of opportunities for various learning styles to fully engage. This includes giving substantive written and oral feedback, receiving feedback, arriving on time and not leaving early, engaging in practice, attendance, submitting make-up work without being reminded, turning in assignments on time, engagement in in-class exercises, attending officer hours, seizing opportunities to challenge current skill level, and engagement outside of class.

My grading is not about achieving perfection. I look for thoughtful risk-taking, preparation, feedback seeking, coachability, readiness to play, and intentional level-upping.

I also look for integrity. If you are slotted to deliver a speech in real life—and then email the organizers after the fact that you had an interview, needed more time to prep, or decided you needed a vacation, they probably aren’t going to hire you again. And even if you are sick – you need to give your client or audience ample time to find another speaker, make other arrangements, or cancel the event.

If for some reason a student must miss a class when their peers deliver speeches, they are expected to watch the class video and send feedback via email, cc’ing the course instructor, to each student who delivered a speech that day. This must be done within 36 hrs of the missed class. In the rare instance where a student must miss a section when they are scheduled to deliver a speech, they must arrange a one-to-one switch with another student, to keep a full number of speeches for each speech-giving class.

Use of AI

Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) will likely influence the way you work in your future careers. Generative AI can help you learn but it can also hinder your development.

Generative AI can produce false, biased and/or misleading information. You are ultimately responsible for the accuracy of any work you submit.

Do not submit AI generated content as your own. All stories, opinions, and perspectives must be your own. You may not use AI to generate speech drafts.

For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper

Joseph Fasano

Now I let it fall back
in the grasses.
I hear you. I know
this life is hard now.
I know your days are precious
on this earth.
But what are you trying
to be free of?
The living? The miraculous
task of it?
Love is for the ones who love the work.

Attendance and Expectations

Increasing our skills in public speaking requires practice, receiving and applying feedback, and observing other speakers. As a result, students must attend and participate in class to pass this course.

As stated previously, this class is for those ready to take risks, hungry to receive and apply feedback, and eager to improve the quality of their results and relationships. As a result, you will receive feedback. This feedback may be about things quite personal to you—your ideas, your body language, your posture, your presence and more. The expectation is for students to arrive able and eager to receive feedback.

Time requirements for this course are likely to be high.

Attendance at all class meetings is required. Every unexcused absence, or repeatedly arriving late or leaving early, will negatively affect your final grade. Certain exceptions for sickness, religious holiday, or personal emergency will be granted only if you contact the instructor and course assistant via email in advance (not right before class starts). Any other reasons, including missing class because you have another class across the river, or you scheduled a job interview at the same time, or you have a speech elsewhere, is an unexcused absence and will reduce your final grade.

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Purpose - Who Should Take this Course?

The purpose of ALD is to help you become more effective, authentic individuals, and leaders. We do this by carving out some sacred time and space in your busy lives to engage in a rigorous, theoretically-supported, meaningful conversation about who you are and the purpose of your leadership. This is a different kind of work. You cannot do it alone. Do not take this course unless you are open to sharing personal insights, experiences, ambitions, and fears both in class and in your Leader Development Groups (LDGs).

ALD requires an unusually high degree of curiosity, reflection, and interpersonal openness. You will be asked to think differently and explore new behaviors. We expect you to be absolutely honest with yourself and others. While few of our students are completely comfortable or sure about this type of work coming in, you must be at least open to experimenting with a different kind of learning. This is the bare minimum for joining ALD. Those who are not fully committed to investing in this course end up wasting their time. More importantly, they waste the valuable time and effort of others. We invite you to be “all in.”

Why Should You Take this Course?

If you spend time reflecting on some of the following challenges, you might consider taking ALD:

• I am 26 years old; I have lived for my resume. I am proud of what I have accomplished, but is that really all there is to it? What do I live for now?
• I seek public success and approval; my achievement masks deeper insecurities.
• I need to appear “strong” and “perfect.” I rarely open up or ask for help. These actions are signs of weakness to me.
• Why do I obsess about my image? Why do I care so much about what others think of me?
• Why am I afraid to tell you who I really am?
• I obsess about status and money, but don’t have the courage to pursue my personal passions. I’m not even sure anymore what they are.

Requirements

• Attend one 80-minute class each week for thirteen weeks in assigned classrooms
• Attend one, two-hour-long meeting per week with a six-person Leader Development Group (LDG). LDGs are held the afternoon of class between 5:30 and 7:30 pm. Rotating facilitators are drawn from the group. LDGs will be assigned in advance by your professor with the intent of creating diverse groups.
• Submit a reflective essay each week via Canvass. Reflections are due NLT midnight on the day following your class. Your reflection should be no less than one paragraph and no more than 2 pages double-spaced (think blog). This reflection is due even if you are the group facilitator that week.
• In lieu of an exam, students will write a final paper on the purpose of their leadership, as well as complete and submit a Personal Leadership Development Plan (PLDP).

Grading

There are three graded requirements:

1. Class participation
2. Weekly reflections
3. Final Essay & Personal Leadership Development Plan (PLDP)

There is one simple overarching criterion for assessing performance in all three areas:

Are you “all in”? Are you deeply engaged in this different kind of work? Are you giving this your best shot?

Course Premise

In its simplest form, here is the theoretical premise for ALD:

To the extent that you have a clearer sense of:

who you are, your life story, your values & principles, your motivations and passions, your leadership purpose, your True North,

When it comes time to lead you will be more likely to:

• step up,
• lead effectively, and
• live a more integrated & meaningful life.

Course Goals:

Overarching: Increased CLARITY (self-awareness) & COMFORT (self-acceptance)

Detailed:

1. Increase your self-awareness by engaging the “big questions” in life, with the goal to live with greater mindfulness and intentionality.
2. Help you uncover personal patterns, decide which ones serve you well (accept and commit to them), and which ones don’t (commit to changing them).
3. Learn how to participate more fully in open, intimate small-group discussions. Learn how to “listen deeply” to others, to be “fully there” for them.
4. Gain some clarity about your leadership purpose, values, and motivations, and the role these play when leading others.
5. Become more honest (and comfortable) with yourself in all dimensions of life.
6. Learn how to empower, engage, and inspire others.
7. Be able to more fully imagine the reality of others.

Course Outline

Drawing broadly from the fields of positive psychology, sociology, adult development, and leadership, you will be exposed to a powerful collection of theoretical frameworks and concepts all selected to support your progress in line with ALD Course Goals. Additionally, you will learn a set of foundational skills essential to the practice of authentic leadership. Finally, you will engage in several rigorous processes designed to support your continued growth and development throughout your life. Here is the course outline for ALD:

Readings

• Brown, Brene. Daring Greatly: How the Courage to be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead. New York: Gotham, 2012.
• Craig, N., George, B.; & Snook, S. The Discover Your True North Fieldbook. New Jersey: Wiley, 2015.
• Stone, D., Patton, B. and Heen, S. Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most. New York: Penguin Books, 2010.

Students receive three texts. The first of them, The Discover Your True North Fieldbook, is the basic text for ALD. Assignments in this workbook are designed to personalize and deepen your understanding of each week’s topic. Students are expected to complete all assigned exercises in this workbook prior to attending class each week.

Selected chapters will be assigned from the books, Difficult Conversations and Daring Greatly.

Leader Development Groups (LDGs)

Prior to our second meeting, each student will be assigned to a six-person Leader Development Group (LDG). LDGs meet in designated classrooms from 5:30 – 7:30 pm each week on the same day as your class. LDG meetings are a central part of the course and as such are treated just like normal class time. Attendance is mandatory. Do not take ALD if you cannot commit to attending all 12 LDG sessions (there is no LDG meeting following Lesson 1).

The purpose of LDGs is to carve out an intimate and safe place to engage in a deeper discussion of that day’s topic with your peers. Each week, a different student will be assigned to facilitate that day’s session. Faculty will provide additional guidance in the form of suggested exercises and discussion questions to help facilitators prepare for and lead their groups.

Each student will have the opportunity to facilitate for two weeks during the course. Facilitators will meet briefly with their professor prior to the LDG to discuss that week’s meeting (typically just following each day’s class). An ALD “Facilitator’s Guide” will be posted on the course website and also sent out to you via email when it is your turn to facilitate. The Facilitator’s Guide will provide a helpful overview of your responsibilities as facilitator for the weeks that you are assigned to that role.

Following each LDG meeting, facilitators will submit a summary of the group’s discussion, including attendance records and open questions.

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Overview:

B2B Sales and Distribution will focus on the primary components of managing a large company sales organizations and focus on B2B businesses.

Career Focus:

If you are going to manage or invest in large companies, you will need to understand how to manage your top line, your sales organization. This course draws heavily although not exclusively on technology companies and is essential if you plan to be a CEO, General Manager or Chief Operating Officer or Chief Revenue Officer.

Educational Objectives:

This course is designed for students who would like to gain an understanding of the complexity of managing large sales and go-to-market organizations. There are three main themes to the class – people, go-to-market strategy and operations and analytics. The people section will address how to hire and manage first line sales managers, define a sales culture and create scalable compensation systems. The go-to-market design module will address how to choose an appropriate sales model to achieve growth and profitability and compare and contrast direct, indirect and other sales models. The operations and analytics module will focus on how AI and a sales operations tool stack give visibility into sales activities and drive sales forecasting accuracy.

Course Content and Organization:

There are live cases and traditional cases to reinforce the three core themes of the class. We have six live cases where senior executives from SalesForce.com, Samsara, IBM, Infor, Workday and EnterpriseDB will join us to grapple with actual sales management challenges they are currently experiencing. Five classes will be HBS published case studies on Microsoft, Qualtrics, ABB and Optigen.

Grading / Course Administration:

Theer is no final paper for this class. Grading will be 70% on class participation and 30% on the two experiential assignments,

Experiential assignment one: Write and submit a paper: You will find a salesperson on your own, interview them about how they are compensated, and write a two-page summary of your conversation.

The second experiential assignment is an opportunity to experience real sales management issues and conduct a role play in class. Topics for the role play include changing a salesperson’s compensation plan, reducing a reseller’s gross margin, managing an unhappy major account and integrating your sales organization into an acquiring company’s sales organization. Each student will be required to submit their strategy for handling management issues ahead of class.

Course Content Keywords:

Large company sales management, sales leadership

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Overview:

BSSE at a Glance

The Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise (BSSE) course is a second-year elective that aspires to teach aspects of the management of innovation, strategy, and growth of a firm from the perspective of the general manager. The central puzzle in this course – and something we will see frequently in our cases - is why managers, acting in seemingly rational ways making logical business decisions, often find their firms in trouble. The course seeks to develop insights into why these things happened and how we should think about them in our future careers.

The original course design was by the late Professor Clayton Christensen. It starts with a grounding in the construction of business theories and bridging those theories to the world of practice. The hope is that we can then recognize well researched theories of causality as a basis for understanding why things happen the way that they do, and become discerning practitioners of theory in our careers.

We choose theories for the course based on their utility in answering some important questions for managers.

Educational Objectives:

The course aspires to teach students to be a better general manager. The objective is to help students apply well-researched academic theories to practical every-day business situations, understand why things happen the way they do, and exercise better decision-making when they encounter similar circumstances in their jobs and careers.

Course Content and Organization:

The course includes 28 class sessions, with a paper to be submitted at the end of the semester. We ask students to make the theory reading the focus of class preparation, and then use the associated case as a vehicle to practice using the theory. As the course progresses, students find that they can use multiple theories as lenses to get a comprehensive picture of what is going on. In each class, we ask students to prepare by understanding what is happening and why. What are the proximate and root causes of why this company is facing the situations articulated in the case? What signals are appearing that suggest the world in which this company has succeeded is about to change? Or, why does this constitute a viable growth opportunity for the company? Then we ask students to think about what needs to be done. What actions can management take that will predictably lead to success? What problems might one predict as management implements different alternatives?

Over the course of the semester, we develop a set of interconnected frameworks that will be a useful toolbox for the future general manager.

Grading / Course Administration:

The grade allocation for this class will be 50% for class participation and 50% for the paper. Students should work with a partner on the paper; teams of three are okay but will have higher expectations vis-a-vis grading. Students are permitted to use ChatGPT or other Generative AI tools but will be asked to declare any such usage.

For class discussions, we encourage inquiry and the exploration of ideas. Many of the theories have important nuances that are best explored widely in class.

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Overview:

This course provides both managers and investors a framework for using financial statements to evaluate a company's strategy execution, performance, financial prospects, and value. Students will develop a deep understanding of different techniques, including the use of agentic AI, to assess both public and private companies and identify attractive opportunities.

Career Focus:

The course is designed for students planning careers where financial statements are a critical decision-making tool, whether in investing (PE, VC, hedge funds), general management, entrepreneurship, or advisory roles such as consulting and banking.

Educational Objectives:

The primary objective of the course is to provide hands-on experience in financial statement analysis and valuation that enhances critical business and investment decisions. By the end of the course, students will be comfortable evaluating complex business and financial contexts to gain a richer understanding of firm performance. As a capstone for the MBA program, BAV integrates and extends fundamental topics covered in RC strategy, accounting, and finance.

Course Content and Organization:

The course uses case-based discussions, live cases, and guest practitioners to develop an integrative framework for value creation, drawing on principles similar to McKinsey's "Valuation" framework, that identifies the key levers of value creation and makes discounted cash flow models more managerially actionable. The framework rests on three analytical pillars:

• Strategy Analysis: assessing a firm's value proposition and identifying its key value drivers and risks.

• Accounting Analysis: evaluating the degree to which accounting policies and standards capture underlying economics; assessing earnings quality; and making adjustments to eliminate accounting distortions.

• Performance Analysis and Forecasting: evaluating how well managers have executed on strategy and financial policy, and assessing the sustainability of their performance; making forecasts of future profitability and risk and valuing the businesses.

The course applies this framework across a variety of valuation contexts, including equity investment, IPOs, mergers, and private company/startup valuation. Students will reconstruct financials, build forecasts, and apply valuation techniques hands-on. Throughout the semester, prominent guest speakers—including CEOs, CFOs, short sellers, hedge fund managers, activist investors, and research analysts—will share firsthand perspectives with the class.

To deepen the ability to apply these skills in a practical context, the course concludes with a comprehensive group project where students conduct a deep-dive valuation and present a stock pitch to a panel of professional investors, including BAV alumni working across the industry. In the past, students' stock recommendations have outperformed the market.

AI & the BAV Repository: Throughout the semester, the course will introduce how agentic AI tools can be used to facilitate and empower complex financial analysis, including a component of the final project that asks students to build their own AI-empowered financial analysis tools. BAV graduates will have ongoing access to a curated repository of stock pitch analyses and student-built AI tools — a growing library of resources they can draw on in their own investing long after the course ends.

Course Content Keywords: Financial statement analysis, quality of earnings, financial forecasting, multiples, valuation, equity research, accounting, financial modeling

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved

Overview

Customers at higher levels of the socioeconomic pyramid are usually served by businesses who synchronize value creation for customers with profits for shareholders. That is not the case for customers who are in the bottom quarter of the socio-economic pyramid who cannot afford to pay for services to yield profits for shareholders. It is often the case that governments and nonprofits/aid agencies step in to serve such customers’ needs. It has become increasingly clear that business approaches have an important role to play in the mix. The course will explore business approaches, including CSR and CSV, its opportunities as well its limitations. We will study how new “venture philanthropy” attempts to serve that segment. We will look at how social impact may be best measured. The backdrop for class discussions will be sectors such as youth development, housing, hunger, financial inclusion, and healthcare, both domestic as well as international. One of the main goals of the course will be to develop an understanding regarding when and how businesses and nonprofits should participate in serving the poor; throughout we will discuss the role of government. A secondary goal of the course is to stoke your own leadership journey towards making a positive difference in the world.

Target Audience

This is a General Management course offered jointly with the Marketing Unit because of its focus on poor customers. The course is intended to bring a social context to the many careers that students wish to aim for. Thus, it should have broad appeal to private sector and public sector entrepreneurs and managers. However, students taking this course should be forewarned that the course materials are not intended to address students’ career needs, including those who wish to go into the nonprofit sector.

Syllabus

Through a mix of cases, readings/book chapters and guest speakers, the course will attempt to identify the principal opportunities, challenges, and limitations of businesses and nonprofits in serving the poor. The course will attempt to address both U.S. as well as global poverty and examine the multiple ways in which business approaches could and should participate in serving the poor. Throughout the course, we will explore the intersection and overlaps of business with civil society and government, all three of whom have key roles to play. A complementary goal of the course will be to develop a manifesto for personal development as you all go out to stake a successful career in business, government or civil society.

Course Evaluation and Grading

40% of the course grade will be based on class participation, 30% for the short final paper, and the rest of the 30% split between the three short response write ups.

Course Content Keywords: Global Poverty, Bottom 2 billion, Business Solutions, Venture Philanthropy, Impact Investing, Philanthropic Investments, Social Entrepreneurship

Overview

Business at the Base of the Pyramid (BBOP) examines one of the most consequential and least understood developments in global capitalism: the rapid growth of commercial markets serving low-income consumers and producers. These populations are not a peripheral or philanthropic segment; they are a central part of the global economy. Yet building viable businesses in these contexts often requires rethinking basic managerial assumptions about value creation, customer access, trust, risk, and scale. This course focuses on businesses that serve people living on low and often volatile incomes. It is a course about business, not charity: strategy, operations, finance, and organizational design remain central. The course also treats social value creation and social risk with the same analytical rigor as financial performance, asking students to assess both commercial logic and broader impact.

Career Focus

BBOP is designed for students who expect to work in global markets and want to build, invest in, advise, or manage businesses serving low-income consumers and producers. It is especially relevant for students interested in entrepreneurship, impact investing, consulting, global business, development-oriented enterprise, and innovation in emerging markets, as well as students who anticipate working in developed markets serving low-income consumers.

Educational Objectives

The course has three main objectives:

1. To help students understand why some base-of-the-pyramid business models succeed while others fail.
2. To develop frameworks for evaluating the commercial viability, operating realities, and scaling potential of businesses serving low-income populations.
3. To build a disciplined approach for analyzing both social impact and financial performance for base-of-the-pyramid businesses.

Across the course, students will examine the extent to which BBOP models differ from mainstream business, where they are surprisingly similar, and how managers can think rigorously about the relationship between commercial value creation and social outcomes. By the end of the course, students will have a sharper set of frameworks for assessing BBOP ventures and a clearer understanding of when business can play a meaningful role in improving lives for the majority of the world.

Course Content and Organization

The course uses a global set of cases to develop general principles that apply across sectors and geographies.

The first module focuses on "the basics of life," examining the role businesses can play in sectors such as health, education, water, food, affordable housing, and household goods. These settings highlight the operational and strategic challenges of serving low-income customers in domains where the stakes are high and execution is difficult.

The second module explores the entry of the digital age into base-of-the-pyramid markets. Students will consider how innovations such as solar technologies, mobile payments, blockchain, and fintech are reshaping access, affordability, and competition.

The final module examines impact investing: what it is, how it relates to BBOP enterprises, and what it takes to finance growth and scale without compromising commercial discipline or social outcomes.

Throughout, the course emphasizes contemporary businesses operating across continents and industries, and uses those cases to help students identify recurring managerial patterns and strategic tradeoffs.

Grading / Course Administration

Grades are based on class participation, three blog posts distributed throughout the semester, and a final project. The blog posts are intended to extend discussion beyond the classroom by asking students to connect course concepts to current events, related readings, and themes that emerge across cases.

The final project is a 1,500-2,500 word essay proposing and analyzing a business solution to a challenge facing those at the base of the pyramid. The business may be existing or hypothetical, but it must be assessed using the frameworks developed in the course. Students are expected to make a clear argument about the model's commercial logic, economics, operating realities, and path to scale, while also evaluating its social value creation and potential for unintended harm.

Course Content Keywords

Base of the pyramid; global markets; emerging markets; entrepreneurship; impact investing; social enterprise; inclusive business; fintech; strategy; sustainable development.

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Overview:

This course examines the entertainment, media, and sports sectors through a series of case studies that focus on companies and personalities in these sectors.

Career Focus:

This course is primarily designed for students who are pursuing a career in film, television, music, publishing, performing arts, sports, or other sectors that supply goods that are commonly associated with artistic, athletic, cultural, or entertainment value.

The course is also useful for students who are planning to work in companies that advise or support those sectors. It may further be interesting for students seeking to advance their knowledge of general management, strategy, and marketing in the context of a challenging, rapidly changing, and fun environment.

Educational Objectives:

The course starts with an examination of the properties that define the entertainment, media, and sports industries, and how those properties together introduce a unique set of challenges and opportunities for managers. Subsequent modules explore:

1. How can entertainment businesses best allocate resources across a portfolio of projects and for one project over time? For example, does it pay to pursue a "blockbuster" strategy?

2. How can entertainment businesses best approach the management and marketing of creative talent? In particular, how should companies invest in and capture value from "superstars" and the teams to which they belong?

3. How are digital technologies changing the entertainment industries? For instance, how are creative businesses affected by - and how can they benefit from - the rise of online channels?

The course ends with an examination of firms that fall outside the core entertainment industries but that seemingly face similar challenges or opportunities.

Course Content and Organization:

Cases focus on established and emerging firms and personalities in media, sports, and other entertainment industries. Examples include The Walt Disney Studios, Beyoncé, Shonda Rhimes, Take Two Interactive, Blumhouse, Live Nation and Pharrell Williams, Real Madrid Club de Fùtbol, Francis Ngannou, the Milwaukee Bucks, David Beckham, Magnolia Network, Ryan Reynolds, Toto Wolff and the Mercedes Formula One Team, Netflix, the NFL, MrBeast, NBC and the Olympics, Big Hit and BTS, Nike SNKRS, the New York Liberty, RedBird Capital Partners, Bloom Books, and Gerard Piqué’s Kings League.

Grading / Course Administration:

Grading is based on class participation (50%) and the final project (50%).

Course Content Keywords:

Entertainment, Media, Sports, Blockbusters, Superstars, Product Management, Talent Management, Digital Strategy.

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved

Overview

Today, ideas matter more than ever. The generators of these ideas – from opinion columnists and non-fiction writers to podcast hosts and those delivering TED Talks – shape how we think about the world, and ourselves, offering new insights and questioning old ones. Massive industries – including book and magazine publishing, the news, and other, emerging mediums like podcasts – nurture and monetize these ideas from inception to audience. Perhaps more than any time in recent memory, ideas and their dissemination are rapidly shifting, dramatically altering the landscape in which we live and conduct business.

This course will introduce students to the creation, monetization, and distribution of ideas. It will interrogate how and why some ideas spread and others do not, the ways in which idea consumption is (and is not) changing, and the challenges and opportunities facing organizations hoping to create and capture value in this space. Discussion topics will include The New York Times, Vogue, Laurene Powell Jobs and The Atlantic, Jeff Bezos and The Washington Post, “new media” figures like Joe Rogan and Bari Weiss, and the impact of AI on the ideas landscape.

At its core, the Business of Ideas is a course about two things: “ideas” and how they shape the world in which we operate; and the big businesses that nurture, launch, monetize, and sustain these ideas, as well as the supply chains that create value from them. Several questions will animate the course. How do idea generators and the businesses surrounding them create and capture value? Why do some ideas gain traction and endure? How do leaders in the space navigate potential tensions between financial upside and cultivating valuable ideas? Careful attention will also be paid to larger social, cultural, and political trends, examining how the business of ideas has changed over time, and how and why it has influenced the ways in which individuals and societies imagine themselves and the world they aspire to inhabit.

Career Focus

This course is geared towards students interested in working on either the “ideas” or “business” side of the Business of Ideas. Any student working on independent creative work should also feel particularly compelled to apply.

Educational Objectives

The course has five main educational objectives:

1. Examine how ideas emerge, gain audiences, and spread.
2. Understand how to create and capture value in today’s idea supply chain.
3. Analyze how leaders navigate complexities facing the Business of Ideas today.
4. Interrogate tensions between “business” and “ideas,” and ways to navigate them.
5. Identify how the Business of Ideas shapes our contemporary moment.

Course Content and Organization:

The course will be structured around the “idea supply chain,” with the beginning of the course focusing on an idea’s inception, before moving through its packaging, distribution, and consumption. In addition, the broader socio-cultural and political context will be a through-line, as the course interrogates the ways in which the Business of Ideas both shapes, and is shaped by, larger contemporary trends.

Grading / Course Administration:

The course will be graded 50% class participation and 50% final project. For their final project, students can submit something from the “ideas” perspective (e.g., an original creative work), or the “business” perspective (e.g., a strategy memo related to the space).

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved

DESCRIPTION:

As MBA students get ready to leave HBS, it can be valuable for them to consider not only the immediate benefits of their job choices but also longer-term opportunities and aspirations. How can they be ready and able to succeed in a CEO role, and will that include building a lasting institution that makes a significant impact on the world?

This course will feature case discussions about CEOs of several main types from several main pathways (e.g., founders, loyalists, outsiders, empire builders), at several key career points (early and looking forward, or later and looking back), from several continents, in organizations that must overcome business challenges while seeking purpose and significance. Students will consider perils, pitfalls, and blind spots and how they can be overcome in order to meet organizational objectives. The course will include in-class dialogues with CEOs about their dilemmas and choices. It will provide opportunities for self-reflection. The course will be useful for “instant CEOs” such as founders as well as “someday CEOs,” as students see how early choices shape later possibilities. It will also equip students with insights that will make them better consultants, investors, board members, partners, or team members for CEOs.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES:

• To deepen understanding of the unique responsibilities of chief executives - the experiences and constraints that come with being at the “top,” and both the privileges and dilemmas. Balancing the leader as a private person with his/her own history and preferences with the demands of public representation of the institution. Choices likely to confront CEOs in a turbulent world, and what accounts for how they resolve the change challenges they must overcome.

• To gain a lifecycle perspective on being a CEO, starting with guiding new enterprises as self-anointed “instant CEOs.” After entrepreneurs/founders move from idea generators to developing a venture, how they fumble or thrive as CEOs. To gain insight into how early choices shape later career paths – the nature of imprinting and path dependency. What it means to do a job vs. find a mission.

• To learn about characteristics of “rent-a-CEOs” and “CEOs by parachute” and when they are effective. To contrast them with loyalists and caretakers who address problems with institutional as well as financial logic. When and whether there an “insider’s advantage.” How outsiders can succeed as institution-building CEOs. The skills and sensibilities involved in creating both success and significance.

• To develop and enhance skills in spotting perils, pitfalls, and blind spots. Enhanced ability to develop personal strategies for overcoming them. Questions of commitment and accountability and what difference they make in CEO choices.

• To encourage aspirations to take on major leadership responsibility, as a CEO or teammate for the CEO, and find role models and life lessons.

Modules will feature cases moving through the lifecycle:

1.Creators – entrepreneur founders

2.Outsiders – serial CEOs and organizational difference

3.Empire Builders – institutions and legacies

Class guests will include numerous CEOs featured in the cases, for dialogue and first-hand insights.

CAREER OBJECTIVES:

The course will provide knowledge and tools for several career paths:

• a jumpstart for those expecting to be CEOs in the near future (e.g., as founders in new ventures or as successors in family businesses)

• tools for consultants and private equity investors who will be working with CEOs to improve their company’s performance

• preparation for members of boards of directors that select and assess CEO’s

Self-reflection: The course will be helpful for students exploring if and when they will be ready for the role and responsibilities of CEOs at some point in their careers. It can provide guidance for mission-oriented students seeking to grow institutions that make a positive difference.

PROPOSED SCHEDULE:

Weekly, 2-hour block

EXAMPLES OF CASES AND SESSIONS:

Creators:

“Ecofi and its Traveling Plumbers: Deploying Blue Collar Workers for Green Impact.” (new case) Featuring Richard Lamondin and his brother, who bootstrapped the development of service company ecofi into a national award-winning SME with no outside money and a hands-on approach but a clear mission to address climate change. With growth of ecofi and change in the external environment, Lamondin grapples with whether his founding assumptions can hold and whether he can find within himself the skills and desires to lead ecofi into its next phase.

“Blue Frontier: Disrupting Air Conditioning.” Featuring Daniel Betts whose approach contrasts sharply with Lamodins’. Betts, a scientist who invented a highly effective new product, wants to grow a giant global industry-changing/industry-leading company. He has attracted major venture capital, large commercial customers, and the attention of competitors. How can he grow himself to make appropriate choices of strategy, partners, and teams to make the leap.

“’The Wheels on the Bus’ Go Electric: Highland Electric Fleets.” Depending on time, this could be added as a creator case or be designed to accompany Blue Frontier. Although Duncan McIntyre is CEO of a services company that sells fleets to government purchasers, he has many things in common with Daniel Betts, but the few things that are different make for a valuable contrast as creators with big aspirations tackle large entrenched systems.

Outsiders:

“Two Misses and a Hit.” (Case under development.) Featuring three women CEOs in prominent companies who start as outsiders both in terms of the company and industry and also because they are the first to break gender barriers in the industry. The companies were in the midst of turbulent industry change and turned to outsiders to lead a transformation. Two of them had mixed results; a third was highly successful and was also mission-driven; she succeeded in strengthening an institution while enabling change to fit the times. The case permits exploration of how to deal with being different from others in the company and overcome barriers stemming from it. It then focuses attention on CEO behaviors that build support and mobilize executives and employees during a transformation that deal with both short-term needs and long-term mission.

“Monique Leroux at Desjardin,” successful transformational CEO of a Canadian financial cooperative, could also be used as a stand-alone case. She was initially an outsider on a number of dimensions, became CFO, then ran for CEO (the mode in a cooperative) even though not the chosen successor. She was elected because she embraced a return to founding values and then empowered employees to innovate while returning local units to a sense of significance. Following 8 years as CEO, and widely considered the most powerful woman in Canada, she became a global spokesperson for the cooperative movement, which included major banks and good companies worldwide.

“The Serial CEO” (in development based on a series of existing cases). Featuring a protagonist who starts his career as a consultant but soon becomes a serial CEO hired in from outside. He grows and then sells two of the companies he headed. In each instance, he takes a senior management position at the top of the acquiring company where he feels he has a mandate to lead change. But in both instances he is passed over as a successor to the current CEO. Why? What’s different about being in charge or being a subordinate? What helps him be effective when solely in charge but less effective as another contender inside a big company?

Empire Builders:

“Publicis Groupe” case series excerpts show long-time CEO Maurice Levy from his early days as a committed employee devoted to the vision of the founder and ultimately role to succeed him in both propelling industry success and proving that a French company could become of global giant and survive/thrive in the midst of industry upheaval. He formed a failed alliance with an American company and then rebounded through a series of high-profile acquisitions which made other CEOs his subordinates and yet treated them as equals. His key skills in relationship building and his personal charm and humility provide a values-drive model of a CEO who outlasts competitors. It also shows what he looks for in a successor and why he might have clung to power.

“Haier: Building a Chinese Giant.” Long-time Chairman Zhang Rumin led a shoddy refrigerator factory in Quindao, China, to become a giant in China and then around the world. He started during the Cultural Revolution in China yet always looked to world models of quality. While making major acquisitions, and with no formal higher education, he developed a path-breaking international management model that empowered employees to become entrepreneurs within the company. We will also see how his consistent philosophy was used to turn around GE Appliances, which he acquired from General Electric in recent years. The case shows how personal beliefs can guide a CEO during many difficult times and help the CEO build a great institution with lessons for other leaders.

“Akin Ongor’s Journey.” As CEO of Garanti Bank, Akin Ongor led the Turkey-based bank to become a European model, while he is one of the most-admired people in the country. When he stepped down, he sought to create a leadership institute for the Middle East. He thinks he has the parts lined up, but he stumbles. This case offers the chance to analyze why and how success at the top produces blind spots and creates traps that make it hard for a successful CEO to exercise leadership outside of the company. It also shows a CEO working with his wife and family on more feasible projects after he leaves the bank. This invites students to take a long-term view of their careers and personal lives.

COURSE REQUIREMENTS:

• Active participation

• Two one-page memos, due at sessions 3 and 5

• Reflective paper (6-8 pages). Using AI to find and query role models that fit the students’ interest, the paper will then require students to write about themselves, their skills and aspirations and how they plan to apply course learnings and role model learnings in their career path. The paper topic will be used as the basis for a possible class presentation in the last class.

This course seeks to explore the theory, history, and state structures of capitalism; examine its manifestations in several national contexts; and understand the ways in which systemic changes to market capitalism are likely to both demand and cause systemic political change as well.

Course Content and Objectives

Capitalism today is under attack, criticized from many quarters as being the source of societal ills that range from inequality and systemic racism to climate change and labor market disruption. The goal of CATS is both to examine these criticisms and, more importantly, interrogate the deep and fundamental connections between the market structures of capitalism and the political structures of the states that seek to support and nourish this system. What are the political prerequisites of a working capitalist system, the course will ask. What are the political risks inherent in a market economy, and what kinds of solutions, both economic and political, are best suited to address the current slate of concerns?

CATS is considerably more theoretical than most courses at HBS. The materials are non-case based, and draw from a combination of book chapters, academic articles, journalistic essays, videos, and podcasts. The reading load is relatively heavy (particularly for the first several sessions of the course), and students should be prepared to engage in conversations that are both philosophical and practical. After an introductory class that highlights several contemporary critiques of our market system, the course dives deep into some of the foundational theories of capitalism (John Locke’s Second Treatise; Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, and Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto) and the capitalist state (F.A. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom, and Karl Polanyi’s Great Transformation). We will then examine several critical tenets of market economies – including property rights and competition – and several of the most pressing problems that are allegedly inherent in their development. After reviewing some of capitalism’s most important international variants, the course will conclude by examining a range of solutions currently being offered to address capitalism’s ills, and discuss their feasibility within various political structures.

Course Administration and Grading

Students will be asked to write three short analyses of weekly course materials and a 1,000-word final paper (together worth 50% of their grade). The remainder of their grade (50%) will be based on class participation.

Copyright © 2025 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Note: Andy Pforzheimer (Harvard College ’84) is the co-founder and former CEO of Barteca (Barcelona Wine Bar and bartaco). He is currently a board member of US Foods and multiple privately-owned restaurant groups.

Click here for a sample syllabus for this course

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Educational Objectives

This course is designed as a capstone for graduating MBA students who want to learn the principles and practices needed to make a difference in the world.

Course Content

Each week, we will analyze case-length biographies of remarkable individuals who created a lasting, world-changing legacy (see list of protagonists below) to understand the life choices they made and the paths they followed.

In the first part of the course, we will use these case studies to uncover the personality traits that must be acquired. Next, we will introduce the Building Blocks used by these prominent people to achieve success and learn how they navigated life’s forks-in-the-road decisions. Then, we consider how and when our protagonists found purpose in their life.

You will learn how to apply these principles to develop a personal strategy that works for you, and how to increase your odds of success in making a difference in the world.

In the final part of the course, we will consider what lessons to draw from the lives of the exceptional people we have studied.

Grading: class participation (40%) and a final paper that will ask you to apply course concepts to analyze an HBS case study of your choice (60%).

If you want to be inspired by the lives of exceptional individuals who changed the world, and think deeply about the choices you will confront in your own life, you will find this course interesting, unique, and invaluable.

Individuals We Will Study:

Business: Mary Kay Ash, P.T. Barnum, Sarah Breedlove (Madam C.J. Walker), Walt Disney, Henry Ford, Katharine Graham, Steve Jobs

Government: Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Robert McNamara, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher

Humanitarian: Mahatma Gandhi, Helen Keller, Nelson Mandela, Bill Wilson

Science: Marie Curie, Albert Einstein

Sports: Muhammad Ali, Jackie Robinson

Writers: Ayn Rand

Entertainment: Leonard Bernstein

Education: James Conant

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Overview:

This course explores the evolution of American capitalism from the founding of the United States to the present. It examines how entrepreneurs, managers, financiers, and policymakers shaped the development of markets, institutions, and organizations. Topics include the rise of Gilded Age industrial giants, the consolidation of financial power, the emergence of large-scale enterprises and scientific management, the growth of labor unions and immigration conflicts, the rise of modern conservatism and debates over the role of government, and the evolution of innovation systems from corporate research laboratories such as Bell Labs to entrepreneurial clusters like Silicon Valley. The course also examines capitalism’s tensions, including slavery, financial crises, regulatory battles, inequality, and the social consequences of technological change, culminating in debates over Big Tech and the future of American capitalism.

Career Focus

For MBAs who want to use historical perspective to guide their thinking about the future of business, markets, and capitalism.

Educational Objectives

The course develops students’ understanding of how American capitalism evolved and how entrepreneurs, firms, and institutions shaped economic development over time. Through historical case studies, students learn to analyze the interaction between markets, business, and government, and to use historical perspective to think more critically about the future of business and the economy.

Course Content and Organization

The course is organized chronologically and thematically around major transformations in business organization, technology, finance, and politics, as well as the tensions that accompanied economic growth. The course is structured around six modules:

1. The Creative and Destructive Sides of U.S. Capitalism
2. The Gilded Age and the Rise of Big Business
3. Immigration, Labor, and Social Conflict
4. Frontier Innovation: From R&D Labs to Silicon Valley
5. Ethics, Finance, and Government
6. Big Tech and the Future of America

Grading and Exam

90% participation; 10% final exam

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved

Overview:

As a consequence of differences in perspectives, finance leaders and other operators often fail to collaborate effectively. Finance teams focus on the value implications of core business decisions. However, many fail to recognize considerations that lie beyond financial ones. Furthermore, many do a poor job applying finance frameworks and reach incorrect conclusions. Other leaders often focus on different issues like delighting customers, developing talent, or innovating. These other leaders frequently have limits in their understanding of finance which prevent them from effectively engaging the finance function.

The finance divide between the finance team and other operators can generate a number of problems. For example, if finance teams are not sufficiently included in the strategic planning process, firms might embrace a strategy that is not tied to a reasonable set of assumptions and projections. More generally, raising and allocating capital effectively requires strong collaboration across many roles.

This course aims to prepare students to bridge the finance divide. It focuses on the core finance activities performed within organizations. These often are run by the CFO. This focus intends to expose you to what these activities are, to engage you in rich discussions about the key considerations behind fundamental choices, and to teach you financial decision-making frameworks and processes that firms often use.

NOTE: Because there is considerable overlap between the fall course, Corporate Finance: Corporate Financial Operations (CFO) 1416, and the spring course, Strategies for Value Creation - (SVC) 1418, students cannot take both of them.

Career Focus:

This course provides a general management perspective on corporate finance and is designed to improve your ability to make strategic and operating decisions that create value. It should appeal to students who want to work as part of senior leadership teams, particularly finance executives; as strategy consultants or investment bankers who advise organizations; or as private equity, public equity, venture capital, or hedge fund investors. The course should also appeal to students who simply want to deepen their understanding of corporate finance and how finance concepts can be effectively applied within a wide range of organizations.

Educational Objectives:

The goal of the course is to provide students with the knowledge, skills, and judgment required to make good strategic, operating, investment, and financing decisions. The course emphasizes the development of practical insights rather than formal theories. We will cover the shortcomings of the frameworks developed in RC Finance 1 and 2. We will discuss how the analytical tools developed in those courses relate to ideas in other courses and how they can be applied to address a broad set of business decisions. We will study the optimal design of processes that are key to an organization’s success, including strategic planning, forecasting, capital allocation, budgeting, risk management, and investor relations.

Course Content and Organization:

The key modules include:

• Measuring and Driving Performance

• Forecasting

• Managing Cash and Source of Funding

• Managing Risk

• Managing Investment, Divestitures, and Portfolios of Businesses

Nearly all class sessions will be case based. We will have numerous guests over the course of the semester, most of whom are HBS graduates. In addition to hearing from several case protagonists, we will be joined by subject matter experts on topics we will discuss. Many of the guests will have held the CFO role at some point in their career. In the past, guests have included Amrita Ahuja, COO and CFO of Block; Adam Aron, CEO of AMC; Amy Hood, CFO of Microsoft; Jonathan Mariner, former CFO of Major League Baseball; Peter Baldwin, CEO of birddogs; and numerous other senior executives. We will use part of our time with these guests to discuss their career paths and explore career options.

Grading / Course Administration:

Grades will be based 50% on class attendance and participation and 50% on the final exam.

Course Content Keywords:

Value-based management, corporate Finance, strategic finance, capital allocation, cash flow management, forecasting, strategic planning, risk management, financial leadership, valuation

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Class meets weekly on Tuesdays as a section.

Class meets weekly on Wednesday nights to enable unique interactions with HBS alumni and other guests. Usually these sessions are from 4:00-6:00pm, but there will be two Wednesday sessions (TBD) that will be later and longer – 5:30-8:30pm – to accommodate special opportunities.

Educational Objectives

Crafting Your Life: The First 10 Years Post MBA (LIFE) is fundamentally a course about you. It is about preparing and equipping you to better handle the choices, tradeoffs, and surprises that you will inevitably face after graduating from HBS. Throughout the course, you will define what a life well-lived means to you, and discover and implement tactics and practices to enable you to live consistently with what matters most to you. In addition, you will consider how to adapt along the way when life inevitably does not go according to plan.

A unique feature of the course is the emphasis on community – with your fellow students as well as alumni. You will have access to alumni and their lived experiences. There are a multitude of interactions with both alumni 10+ years out reflecting on their lives to date as well as the over 400 former students of the course (known as LIFERs) who continue to be involved and share their current experiences. Alumni and LIFERs interact with students as part of the class in more traditional ways as case protagonists, and panelists, but also as part of small group discussions and one-on-one conversations. These interactions are meant to help inform you about others’ experiences and what they learned from them – and in turn to help you think more deeply about what you want out of your life and how you want to best equip yourself for what lies ahead.

The course strives to help you think deeply and intentionally about the following questions:

1. Defining Your Compass

• What are my values? Who am I at my best?

• How has my past shaped me? What assumptions do I have about my life – which do I want to keep and which do I want to revise?

• What does it mean to me to live a good life? What is important to me, and how will I prioritize my time and energy towards what matters most?

2. Owning Your Actions

• How do I approach decisions and tradeoffs across different areas of my life?

• How do I use my time on a daily and weekly basis? How do I create and change habits that enable me to continue making progress towards the life that I want?

• How do I think about my choice of geography?

• How do I create structures for navigating life, with all of its twists and turns, with a life partner?

• How do I think about career/family choices? What does it mean to be part of a dual-career couple? Would I ever consider opting out of the work force?

3. Equipping Yourself for What You Cannot Control

• How do I take care of myself, and especially take care of my mental health? How do I build my capacity for resilience?

• How do I develop relationships that will sustain me – both at work and in life?

• How do I think about making a “difference” in the world? In what ways can I craft my life and my job in ways that will enable me to achieve my goals?

With this in mind, LIFE is not your typical HBS class. When you sign up for LIFE, you sign up for:

• A Laboratory. We think of life as a laboratory, and crafting your life as an ongoing discovery process of experimenting, learning, and adapting over time. Similarly, the LIFE course is not and never will be a finished product. The first version of the course was developed in close partnership with EC students and we continue the process of co-creation with students every year—and expect you to play an active role in shaping the course for future generations. By getting comfortable with trying new and different ways of learning, providing feedback, and sharing ideas to improve the course, you will also practice a “test-and-learn” mindset and develop skills that you can apply in your own life laboratory.

• A Community for Life-Long Learning. When you join LIFE, you are joining a broader community of students and alumni invested in learning with and supporting each other in the pursuit of a life well-lived. Throughout the course, we will build shared language, skills, and norms about what it means to craft your life, thereby enabling you to engage with one another deeply on personal topics that might otherwise be undiscussed in an academic or professional setting. LIFERs (graduates of the course) will interact with you throughout the semester, and in the final class they will welcome you into the LIFER community.

• Intergenerational Learning. HBS has a tremendously broad and diverse alumni network with a wide array of professional and personal experiences. LIFE is a platform to unlock the potential of the alumni network by facilitating intergenerational learning. Throughout the course, you will engage with alumni in a variety of ways, including: one-on-one interviews, panel discussions on specific topics, and two unique events—a reception featuring small group conversations between students and alumni and a celebration at the end of the semester where LIFERs will welcome you into the LIFER community.

Two important notes to consider, before signing up for LIFE:

• LIFE involves a lot of work. LIFE students should be deeply invested in learning about themselves, in supporting others, and in partnering with Professor Perlow and the LIFE Team to innovate on the course and the broader LIFE initiative. Former students have commented on the intense workload!

• The alumni vignettes that you will read/hear in LIFE are meant to share with you diverse examples of HBS alums who have made different choices, in different areas of their lives, for many different reasons, and have drawn many different life lessons from those choices. When you read/hear these materials, and when we discuss them in class, the goal is for you to learn from their experiences and think about what their experiences teach you about you. We’re not interested in judging them or assessing whether they are living a life well lived. It’s your job to figure out what it means for you to live a life well lived by engaging with these materials and conversations.

Course Structure and Requirements

LIFE has two sections of 40 students each. This class size is designed to foster deep connections through class discussion, small group conversations, and pair-and-shares.

Time

LIFE has a unique class structure designed to create the best possible learning environment for each topic and experience. Each section meets separately on Tuesdays during a regular X schedule block, and both sections will come together on Wednesday nights from 4:00-6:00pm except on two Wednesday nights – TBD – class will meet from 5:30-8:30 to enable special opportunities. All Wednesday sessions are considered classes, and you are required to attend all of them.

Assignments During Semester

Weekly Readings. Each week you will read cases and/or vignettes about alumni as you do in a traditional HBS class. However, the intent of these cases/vignettes is to help you understand what the person being described did, and for you to reflect on your own reactions and what you would do – not to judge what they did.

Weekly Exercises. Most weeks you will have exercises that accompany the readings to learn more about you, whether it’s looking back at your past, or tracking how you spend your time, or playing a life simulation to uncover the choices and tradeoffs you are inclined to make. The exercises will include LIFE Reflection & Activity workbook exercises and other online exercises.

Module Reflections. At the end of each of the three modules of the course you are asked to stop and reflect on what you have been learning about yourself. These reflections are required to be done on time, but are not graded, and rather are built in for you to pause and explore your insights. They will form the basis of your final paper so the more you invest during the semester the easier your task come the end of the term.

Interviews. Throughout the semester you are required to conduct 4 interviews. The first interview is with a former Crafting your Life student (LIFER) and the remaining 3 are with alumni five or more years out of HBS. You can choose your own alumni or use the LIFE Connect tool developed for this course to match you with alumni that are prepared to talk about the topics you are hoping to discuss. The LIFE Interview Guide and Notebook is where you will capture your preparation and interview notes before formally writing up your learnings as part of the final paper. You will submit your LIFE Interview Guide and Notebook as part of the final course submissions.

Final Paper

Your final paper is an opportunity to compile all that you have done throughout the semester. Essentially, you will be “writing” your final paper throughout the semester through the weekly exercises, module reflections, and alumni interview summaries. The purpose of the paper is to meaningfully reflect on all that you’ve learned about yourself, and to create something to which you can refer back throughout your life. The final paper integrates what you have learned, and you will also involve the creations of an artifact as a tangible companion piece to the paper to remind you in your daily life of what you have learned about yourself and wish to stay true to going forward.

Design Partners

LIFE is unique in that it is an EC course created by EC students, for EC students. The course originated in 2019 through a partnership between EC students and HBS alumni and continues to evolve (in both form and content) in collaboration with our students – who we consider to be our design partners. If you sign up for LIFE, you are not just electing to take a course—you are choosing to pick up the baton from those students who came before you, and continue the course development process with all the attendant joys of leaving a legacy that will be part of HBS students’ experience for years to come. Note, however, that this also requires the full awareness that some aspects of LIFE are in the process of being designed, in partnership with you. Your ongoing feedback and help will be part of the experience, and part of the learning that you (and we) take away from the course.

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Career Focus

This course provides students with skills and knowledge that will prepare them for a variety of careers including all types of investing (particularly in companies with debt), special situations investing, financial advisory, and general management.

Educational Objectives

Corporate restructuring is a common and significant event affecting not only lenders, shareholders, and employees but also the web of relationships between companies and their corporate customers, suppliers, and competitors. Restructuring is the process by which companies renegotiate the financial contracts and commitments they have entered into with their creditors and other stakeholders, usually in response to some financial challenge or crisis. This process of renegotiation and re-contracting - the “re-slicing of the corporate pie” - is the central focus of the course.

An additional objective in dissecting the complex finances and operating challenges that confront companies in financial distress is to deepen student understanding of corporate debt financing, including the rights of secured creditors, subordination agreements, and debt covenants. By understanding how to fix a “sick” capital structure, students will better understand how to optimally finance a business, and more effectively manage financial risk, when times are good.

Lastly, there are important lessons to be learned through studying companies and industries that have struggled. Through understanding a variety of reasons why “things go wrong”, students will be better able to identify the patterns of behavior that often lead to trouble.

Content and Organization

The course is organized around two modules. The first module focuses on the restructuring of debt – and provides a foundation to understand the fundamentals of corporate restructuring and then applies these tools to explore the many offensive and defensive strategies employed by debtors, creditors, and other constituents. The second module focuses on the restructuring of other sections of the balance sheet such as mass tort claims or employees’ claims.

The cases that students study in this course tend to focus on large companies, with complex capital structures, facing extremely challenging business situations (including threats to their survival). Restructurings are often extremely complicated, and involve multiple issues around valuation, bond indentures, subordination agreements, bankruptcy law, employment law, taxes, litigation, regulation, etc. In analyzing the cases in the course, emphasis will be placed on drilling down into the details and "fine print" of these and other issues.

Topics covered in this finance course include Chapter 11 bankruptcy, out-of-court workouts, distressed exchange offers, "Section 363" asset sales, prepackaged bankruptcy, debtor-in-possession (DIP) financing, mass tort clais, restructuring of retiree health care/pension plans, and corporate layoff/downsizing programs. While the course focuses on U.S. corporates, it also applies the core principles of U.S. restructuring to corporate restructurings in other countries as well as infrastructure, municipal, and sovereign restructuring.

Although CVCR is primarily a finance course, students will also often have to take an interdisciplinary approach to problem solving, drawing on their training in strategy, accounting, law, and negotiation. The primary pedagogical approach is case discussion. Cases will be supplemented with mini-lectures and outside readings. We will also be joined by a number of visitors who were involved in the cases.

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Educational Objectives

This seminar will bring together students in Year 3 of the Harvard Business School / Harvard Kennedy School of Government joint degree program. Meetings will be held on ten Mondays in fall term, from 4:30-7:30 PM

This 3.0-credit course is open only to students in the HBS/HKS Joint Degree Program, and is a required course for all joint degree students in the fall semester of their third year. Its purpose is to integrate the perspectives and analytic tools provided by the HKS core curricula in the MPP or MPA/ID programs with the perspectives and analytic tools provided by the required HBS curriculum in the MBA program.

The course features a series of integrative modules on specific topics. In each of the modules, pairs of faculty members, one from HBS and one from HKS, teach as a team, bringing their distinctive perspectives and analytical approaches to bear on a specific subject area. These subject areas may be defined by: policy realms (for example, finance, tax, health, education, environment, or national defense); methods (for example, decision making under uncertainty, project evaluation, performance measurement, or negotiation); or other topics (for example, international trade, technological innovation, economic development, infrastructure, insurance, management styles and processes, or risk management).

Students will emerge from this course with an understanding of questions such as: how a regulation is developed and promulgated, and how business can seek to influence the outcome; how legislative battles are fought and how business organizes to shape provisions in legislation; and how business and government can work together to shape an international environment that is conducive to economic growth. The aim of the course is to cultivate in students the capacity to view problems comprehensively from multiple perspectives: how various business interests view an issue, and how government officials in a variety of agencies and institutions view the same problem.

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Creating the Modern Financial System offers a vital perspective on finance and the financial system by exploring the historical development of key financial instruments and institutions worldwide. The premise of the course is that students will gain a richer and more intuitive understanding of modern financial markets and organizations by examining where these institutions came from and how they evolved. The course is ideal for students who want to deepen their understanding of real-world finance.

Course Organization and Objectives

The course content covers pivotal financial developments in a diverse set of countries – but with a special focus on the United States – from the 18th century to the present. Reaching across the chronological arc of the course are three broad topics: (1) financial markets and instruments, (2) financial intermediaries, and (3) financial behavior. Although nearly every case touches on all three topics, each case also has a primary focus. Whereas some cases highlight the introduction of new financial markets (such as the Dojima futures market in early modern Japan) or the creation of new instruments (such as mortgage-backed securities), others trace the emergence and maturation of critical financial institutions (including banks and insurance companies). Still others focus on the behavior of financial actors and groups, particularly in the context of financial bubbles and crashes. Because the course highlights the origins of financial markets and instruments as well as the fallout from numerous financial crises, government also looms large as an actor in many of the cases.

Throughout the course, the goal is to provide students with the broadest possible grounding in real-world finance by exposing them to some of the greatest (and, at times, most devastating) moments in modern financial history. Although the past is unlikely to repeat itself exactly, business managers who have a strong background in financial history are likely to be better prepared for the full diversity of financial innovations, shocks, and crises that they'll face in the future.

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Course Administration

Course grades will be based on class participation (50%) and a final paper (50%).

Course Content Keywords

Financial history, financial system, financial crises, financial instruments, financial intermediaries, financial regulation

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Overview:

This course focuses on crisis leadership and how leaders, their teams, and organizations rise to the challenges of unexpected, high-stakes situations. More specifically, it examines how the exigencies of intense turbulence act as crucibles in which ordinary people (and their teams) make themselves capable of doing extraordinary things—first, internally, and then, externally in terms of what they achieve as they pursue larger, tangible objectives.

The class concentrates on different leaders and situations. Some of these people and contexts are from the past; others are from our own time. In each instance, the relevant people are enveloped by a profound crisis that no one saw coming. But once many of these actors were in the middle of calamity, they recognized they could not falter and then fail to recover; they couldn’t give up (although many came close.) Instead, most of the men and women whom we will meet resolutely navigated through the storm and were transformed. Each became more resilient, stronger, braver, and more self-assured in the high waves and strong winds they confronted.

Understanding precisely how these people did this is the overarching objective of the course. We will pay particular attention to the larger “rules of the road” of crisis management and leadership. We will also concentrate on the more specific insights, tools, and behaviors that these leaders developed—often, on the fly—and then used to steer through the crisis and to accomplish their ambitious goals. In each instance, we will assess which of these resources are useful to leaders in today’s world of non-stop crises.

We will also study more than a handful of failures: people and organizations that could not—or did not—deal effectively with the crises engulfing them. We will pick these stories apart as we examine the many lessons that such setbacks offer us.

By the last session, each of us will have assembled a toolbox of concrete insights, actions, and personal behaviors to help us be consistently more focused, resilient, confident, and courageous in our anxious, uncertain time.

Virtually all the cases we will examine are gripping. From the frozen icebergs of Antarctica to the peaks of the Himalayas to the fast and furious financial markets, and the fight for racial equality, the stories are as unforgettable as the takeaways they present to us.

Career Focus:

The course will be of particular interest to those who aspire to lead others toward a worthy, significant mission—either in an established organization or in an entrepreneurial endeavor. It is particularly well-suited to those interested in the non-stop crises of the present moment and what this broader context means for leading effectively and courageously.

Educational Objectives:

This course has three principal educational objectives.

First, to understand the principles of crisis leadership. We will concentrate on the general components of steering an organization through unexpected disaster, paying close attention to how these aspects of leadership differ from those relied on in more stable environments. We will examine the “rules of the road” or “dashboard” of crisis leadership with reference to numerous widespread emergencies, including the Covid pandemic, evaluating the successes and failures of different teams as they tried to navigate the large storms they faced.

Second, to understand how crises always contain the possibility of substantial innovation. Some of this innovation occurs at an organizational level as the time pressures and high-stakes nature of crisis situations (literally) force creativity in staffing, problem-solving, teamwork, collective purpose, and other features of performance. Some of the innovation unfolds at a deeper level as individuals realize internally they must raise the level of their respective games and begin leading themselves with new resilience, commitment, humanity, clarity, and courage. We will examine this process and its results in many leaders, distilling the relevant lessons for our respective paths forward.

Third, to analyze the insights, tools, and behaviors that the men and women we are studying developed in crisis situations. Many of these resources were created “on the fly,” in the crucible of a crisis, but most of these tools transcended the disaster in which they originated and became key elements of these individuals’ leadership playbooks. What were these tools and what functions did they serve that proved so longstanding and significant? These are the questions we will answer as we focus our attention on which of these insights, tools, and behaviors are useful to our leadership going forward.

Grading / Course Administration:

Grading is based on class participation (50%) and the final paper (50%), which is not a research paper, but, instead, is three essay responses to relevant prompts.

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This advanced negotiation course examines complex corporate deals. Many of the class sessions will be structured around actual corporate deals, selected for the complex issues of law and business that they raise. Students will research and analyze these transactions in order to present their most important aspects and lessons to the class. The goal is to help students develop their transactional instincts, better prepare them to anticipate deal challenges, and equip them with the skills to creatively address those challenges through contract and deal design.

Topics developed throughout the course include: how negotiators create and claim value through the setup, design, and tactical implementation of agreements; complexities that can arise through agency, asymmetric information, moral hazard, and adverse selection; structural, psychological, and interpersonal barriers that can hinder agreement; and the particular challenges inherent in the roles of advisors as negotiators. The course will also explore the differences between deal-making and dispute resolution; single-issue and multiple-issue negotiations; and between two parties and multiple parties.

The class will be comprised of approximately an equal number of students from HBS and HLS. For HLS students, the basic course in Corporations, Corporations taken concurrently, or permission of the instructor is a prerequisite. A familiarity with basic business concepts will be assumed throughout the course. For HBS students, in addition to the first-year curriculum, a basic Negotiations course is recommended though not required.

Evaluation will be on the basis of class participation and a final paper or project.

Students in this course may also be interested in Mark Gordon and Meng Lu’s Mergers and Acquisitions Workshop: Boardroom Strategies and Deal Tactics at Harvard Law School. Prof. Subramanian encourages students to register for both courses. The classes complement each other substantively and the timing works out in that the workshop takes place in the same time slot as Deals but during the first half of the semester, with no overlap.

Copyright © 2024 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Overview:

This advanced negotiation course examines complex corporate deals. Many of the class sessions will be structured around actual corporate deals, selected for the complex issues of law and business that they raise. Students will research and analyze these transactions in order to present their most important aspects and lessons to the class. The goal is to help students develop their transactional instincts, better prepare them to anticipate deal challenges, and equip them with the skills to creatively address those challenges through contract and deal design.

Career Focus:

This course is restricted to JD/LLM and MBA students and is geared towards preparing those students to face complex deals of many different natures. In the spring, there are often guest practitioners that join the course, and they hail from both legal and business backgrounds to offer their expertise. The class will be comprised of approximately an equal number of students from HBS and HLS. For HLS students, the basic course in Corporations, Corporations taken concurrently, or permission of the instructor is a prerequisite. A familiarity with basic business concepts will be assumed throughout the course. For HBS students, in addition to the first-year curriculum, a basic Negotiations course is recommended though not required.

Educational Objectives:

Topics developed throughout the course include: how negotiators create and claim value through the setup, design, and tactical implementation of agreements; complexities that can arise through agency, asymmetric information, moral hazard, and adverse selection; structural, psychological, and interpersonal barriers that can hinder agreement; and the particular challenges inherent in the roles of advisors as negotiators. The course will also explore the differences between deal-making and dispute resolution; single-issue and multiple-issue negotiations; and between two parties and multiple parties.

Course Content and Organization:

In previous iterations, this course has been split into four modules. Module 1 introduces the different perspectives that law and business training bring to transactions. Module 2 provides certain building blocks for transactional practice, through a series of focused caselets. Module 3 examines the particular tactical aspects of deal execution and deal drafting. This module will feature two complex negotiation exercises, each focusing on different aspects of dealmaking. Module 4 examines complex corporate deals, focusing in particular on multi-party deals and the lawyer/business interface.

Grading / Course Administration:

Evaluation will be on the basis of class participation and journals.

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Overview:

This course examines the distinctive challenges and opportunities of leading and governing concentrated ownership enterprises, where control rests with a founder, family, or small group of owners. Many of these businesses are family-controlled, but similar dynamics arise in founder-led firms, partnerships, and other organizations where ownership and decision-making authority are closely aligned. These businesses account for a substantial share of global economic activity, yet their strategic decisions are shaped not only by market forces but also by ownership structures, family and partnership relationships, and long-term stewardship goals. Through cases, discussions, and guest perspectives, the course explores how owners design governance systems, manage operating companies, structure family offices, and navigate succession across generations. Students will develop frameworks for understanding how ownership influences strategy, leadership, and capital allocation, and will gain insight into the practices that enable some family enterprises to sustain performance, unity, and impact over multiple generations.

Career Focus:

This course is designed for all students pursuing careers at the intersection of ownership, management, and strategy in concentrated ownership enterprises. It is directly relevant to those who expect to work in, invest in, start, or acquire concentrated ownership businesses, whether through a private equity firm, search fund, family office, or as a manager or executive within a family enterprise itself. It is also valuable for students who expect to advise enterprises with concentrated ownership, including through family offices, private equity firms, consulting, or legal and financial advisory roles.

Family enterprises are far more significant than popular perception suggests. Though often dismissed as small, insular operations, family-owned and family-controlled businesses account for a substantial share of global economic activity and include some of the world's most powerful companies: Walmart, Cargill, Koch Industries, Fidelity, and Ford, among many others. These businesses span the full spectrum of size and structure: private and public, wholly family-owned and investor-backed, with governance arrangements ranging from simple ownership structures to dual-class stock designed to preserve family control across generations. Family offices and family foundations are among the fastest-growing organizational forms in the world.

What makes these businesses distinctive is not just their ownership structure, but the way ownership shapes strategy, governance, leadership and legacy. Questions of succession, family dynamics, capital allocation, and the balance between institutional discipline and family values create a management context that is uniquely demanding and uniquely rewarding. This course prepares students to navigate that complexity with clarity, rigor, and judgment.

Educational Objectives:

Explain the economic importance and structural diversity of concentrated ownership enterprises, including private, public, and investor-backed family-controlled firms.

Analyze how ownership shapes strategy, governance, and leadership in family-controlled businesses.

Evaluate governance mechanisms used to balance family control and professional management, including boards, ownership structures, and family institutions.

Assess succession challenges and generationaEl transitions and develop approaches for maintaining continuity and performance across generations.

Apply ownership-based strategic thinking to roles in family enterprises, family offices, private equity, search funds, and advisory contexts.

Course Content and Organization:

Module 1: The Family
Module one focuses on the Family system, the bedrock of the broader Family organization. We examine the values and virtues that shape how family members engage with one another, as well as the governance structures needed to support effective family decision-making, communication, and long-term alignment.

Module 2: The Operating Company
Module two explores the Operating Company and the corporate governance structures that support both the business and the broader Family organization. We examine the relationship between family ownership and professional management, as well as the role of non-family minority partners and the acquisition of operating companies outside the family.

Module 3: The Family Office
Module three examines the Family Office and its role in managing family wealth and the governance systems that accompany it. We study best practices related to (a) when and how to establish a Family Office, (b) bringing in professional management, and (c) designing effective compensation and incentive structures.

Module 4: Building a Lasting Family Legacy
Module four brings these elements together by exploring what it takes to build an enduring family legacy. We focus on developing capable stewards of family wealth and examine the internal and external challenges families face in sustaining unity and long-term impact. Particular attention is given to the integration of (1) family governance and shared values, (2) corporate governance and control of operating businesses, and (3) wealth governance through the Family Office.

Cases and Course Approach

Cases focus on established and emerging companies, products, and personalities in family businesses and family offices, both in the United States and internationally. Many case protagonists and guest speakers will join the course to share firsthand perspectives on both successes and failures. Throughout the course, we will examine both successes and failures to identify best practices and common pitfalls.

While families vary widely in how they organize themselves, those that sustain wealth and enterprise across generations typically develop clear policies and governance frameworks. These may include mission statements, shareholder agreements, succession plans, inheritance policies, distribution rules, and family participation guidelines. When thoughtfully designed, these structures help educate family members, clarify expectations, and strengthen long-term cohesion.

Grading / Course Administration:

Course is based 50% on participation, and 50% on the final project, which is a paper or presentation of the student’s choice.

Course Content Keywords:

Concentrated ownership, Family enterprises, Family business, ownership strategy, general management, family dynamics, corporate governance, succession, family offices, legacy.

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved

Enrollment is limited to second-year students in the MS/MBA: Engineering Sciences program.

Course Description

Launching a successful startup requires a business model that defines the venture’s customer value proposition; plans for technology, operations, and marketing; and a formula for eventually earning profit. It also requires an organization that can execute that business model. Students will learn the attributes of effective tech venture business models and organizations—and how to design them. They will employ system dynamics modeling using simulation software to inform business model choices, and gain practice with organization design methods to diagnose misalignment and resolve tradeoffs (e.g. efficiency vs. effectiveness, decision speed vs. quality).

Copyright © 2023 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Overview:

Digital technologies are reshaping operations, improving efficiency, quality, speed, and enabling new business models. The ability to integrate digital technologies into operational strategy is increasingly critical. Focusing on the operational enablers and implications of digital transformation, this course examines how companies integrate and scale digital technologies in their core operations.

This course examines how firms can leverage digital tools to improve workflows, enhance decision-making, redesign processes, and fundamentally restructure value chains. The course will expose students to how traditional firms are using digital technologies to transform their operations, and how digital-first firms are innovating in digitally-enabled operations.

Career Focus:

Designed for students aspiring to leadership roles at the intersection of technology and operations, the course is relevant for careers in operations, consulting, product management, entrepreneurship, and venture capital.

Students will analyze how firms digitize services and supply chains, streamline processes, and implement new business models. They will gain insights into advising firms on digital transformation, managing tech-driven operations, and investing in emerging business models.

Educational Objectives:

By the end of this course, students will be able to:

• Examine how digital technologies allow firms to improve efficiency, quality, and speed, and foster innovation. Students will recognize the importance of process design and adaptation in leveraging digital transformation.
• Analyze the role of digital integration in operations and how firms leverage digital technologies to synchronize workflows, systems, and data across internal and external partners.
• Assess how automation, AI, and data analytics transform operations by enabling predictive decision-making, intelligent automation, and scalable digital workflows.
• Understand the interplay between digital and physical operations, the different constraints and bottlenecks each present, and how to combine bits and atoms effectively for scaling.
• Understand how digital integration leads to the unbundling and rebundling of operations and its implications for restructuring traditional value chains.
• Identify opportunities and challenges in digitizing operations and recognize the importance of operational enablers such as real-time data accuracy, process redesign, and system interoperability, which are essential for unlocking the full potential of digital transformation.

Course Content and Organization:

This course will primarily use case discussions, with some sessions featuring guest speakers and hands-on exercises to deepen learning.

The cases will cover recent examples of traditional firms digitizing their operations and digital native companies in different geographic markets, and will feature examples from a variety of industries, including manufacturing, logistics, supply chain, financial services, hospitality, and technology.

The course will tentatively be structured into three modules:

Module 1: Foundations of Digital Operations

This module introduces fundamental concepts of digital transformation across industries, focusing on automation, AI, APIs, and data-driven workflows. Students will explore how digital technologies reshape operations, enable real-time decision-making, and drive efficiency. They will recognize the importance of operational enablers and process redesign in effectively integrating technology.

Module 2: Digital Integration and the Unbundling of Operations

Digital integration enables unbundling and rebundling of operations, redefining how firms create and capture value. This module examines the rise of specialized service providers and orchestrators—firms that coordinate multi-party ecosystems through digital platforms. Students will analyze how companies adapt their processes to new industry structures, shifting competitive dynamics, and changing operational roles.

Module 3: Scaling Digitally-Enabled Operations

This module focuses on the opportunities and challenges associated with scaling digitally enabled operations. The module concludes with final project presentations, where students will analyze the digital transformation of operations in a company or industry.

Grading / Course Administration:

Grading will be based on class participation (50%), several short assignments (15%), and a final group (or individual) project in which students will explore the digital transformation of operations in a company or industry (35%).

Course Content Keywords: Digital operations, technology

Overview:

Virtually every organization considers growth a critical objective. But while almost universally desired, and much talked about, enterprise growth is quite poorly understood. Careful empirical studies show that very few enterprises grow profitably over sustained periods of time. Indeed, many organizations’ pursuit of growth is the very cause of their demise. When and how can companies grow profitably? This is the central issue examined in this course.

Career Focus:

This course is designed for students pursuing careers in general management, strategy, consulting, private equity, venture capital, or entrepreneurship—any role that involves making or evaluating growth decisions. The frameworks and cases are intentionally drawn from a wide range of industries (fast food, fintech, luxury goods, life sciences, aviation, technology, medical devices, and professional services), making the course relevant regardless of industry focus. Students will develop practical skills in diagnosing when and how to grow, assessing organizational readiness for growth, and understanding the trade-offs inherent in different growth strategies.

Educational Objectives:

One of the primary objectives of the course is to get students to think strategically about growth. Growth involves a series of choices about rate (e.g. how fast to grow?), direction (scale vs. scope), and method of growth (e.g. organic vs. acquisition). A coherent set of choices regarding these elements constitutes a firm’s growth strategy and impacts whether it can grow profitably. Students will learn to diagnose the key constraints on growth, evaluate organizational readiness for expansion, assess the trade-offs between different growth methods, and understand how innovation and transformation can sustain long-term growth. The course will use a mixture of case studies drawn from a variety of contexts, including fast food, airlines, non-profits, luxury goods and services, life science, medical devices, software, professional services, manufacturing, and private aviation. We will also use readings to introduce the theoretical and conceptual foundations of the course.

Course Content and Organization:

The course is organized into four modules across 14 sessions, plus a final paper.

Module 1: Introduction to the Concept of Growth Strategy—How Fast to Grow? (Classes 1–2) We introduce the basic growth strategy framework and focus on the rate of growth: How fast should an organization grow? What factors impede growth rates? What are the growth traps into which organizations can fall? Cases: Pal’s Sudden Service, Whole Foods.

Module 2: Growth Through Scaling—The Challenges of Expanding Supply to Meet Demand. (Classes 3–6) We examine the challenges of increasing the scale of an organization while preserving the distinguishing attributes that led to its success. Cases: Dutch Bros Coffee, OpenAI, Ualá, BairesDev.

Module 3: Growth Through Expanding Scope—Finding New Sources of Demand. (Classes 7–8) We explore diversification as a growth strategy, examining organizations with ample resources but limited demand in their primary markets. Cases: Virgin Group, HondaJet.

Module 4: Growth Through Innovation and Transformation. (Classes 9–14) We examine the challenges of growth through transformation and explore whether there are ultimately limits to company growth. Cases: Becton Dickinson, Flagship Pioneering, Ferrari, General Electric, Bombardier, plus a review and integration session.

Grading / Course Administration:

Class Participation (50%): Students are expected to prepare thoroughly for each class and contribute meaningfully to case discussions. Both the frequency and quality of contributions are considered. Final Paper (50%): Students will complete a final written paper that applies the course frameworks to analyze a growth strategy challenge.

Course Content Keywords:

growth strategy, scaling, diversification, innovation, organizational transformation, acquisitions, entrepreneurship, operating models, strategic management, corporate strategy

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved

This course is about one of the largest industries in the world: energy. Not only will we cover energy sectors that have traditionally supplied economies across the globe, but we will also cover the energy transition needed to reduce climate change and its impacts. It will examine the economic, regulatory, and social contexts that provide the dynamic backdrop for how both new entrants and incumbent firms can navigate and drive the energy transition. How does the energy economy work, and how fast can it change? How are entrepreneurial start-ups disrupting the energy economy? How are corporations across sectors navigating and potentially driving the energy transition—or not? How are new policies being enacted worldwide impacting billion-dollar decisions? And how are different local communities responding, given the benefits and costs of enormous changes in the energy mix?

Energy tackles all of these questions and more.

This class is for students with a wide variety of interests seeking a better understanding of the role of energy in business and society. It will examine the energy transition in a time of surging global energy demand and the era of climate change. The course aims to drive an understanding of energy from both the supply and demand sides. It will unlock smarter perspectives in other domains, such as finance, real estate, and technology, that all rely on energy. Students will learn about new technologies and choices impacting financing, development, and deployment. Students will appreciate the interplay between market, regulatory, and societal influences on firm opportunities and choices.

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Overview:

Entrepreneurial Finance prepares students to navigate the full arc of startup financing—from first check to exit. Whether you plan to start a company, join one early, sit on a board, advise founders, or invest, this course provides the frameworks and judgment to make better financing decisions. We cover the mechanics of SAFEs, priced rounds, and term sheet negotiation, but also the messier realities of down rounds, bridge financing, and venture debt. We cover every step from incorporation to the eventual liquidity events—through secondaries, M&A, and public listings—that underpin the entire startup ecosystem. The course will expose students to the financing realities of a wide variety of businesses and case protagonists join more than half of our sessions, exposing you to the range of management styles and perspectives you'll encounter in practice.

Career Focus:

Entrepreneurial Finance (EF) is designed for students who plan to be involved with a startup venture, broadly defined, at some point in their career: as a founder, early joiner, board member, advisor, or investor. The course is also applicable for students interested in gaining a broader view of the financing landscape, going far beyond the basics of equity financing introduced in TEM.

Educational Objectives:

EF introduces students to the complexities of evaluating and financing young, high-potential ventures, with a specific emphasis on the frameworks, tools, deal terms, and varying sources of capital associated with high-growth startup companies. Throughout the course, we will seek to answer the fundamental set of questions all entrepreneurs should ask themselves about their financing strategy: How much capital does the company need to raise at this stage? When should we raise this capital? From whom can and should we raise this capital, and under what terms can we raise it? How can entrepreneurship solve social problems and how should ventures be financed when there are benefits beyond the bottom line? And finally, but crucially, what are the strategic considerations of our financing approach?

Although the course is centered on an entrepreneur’s perspective when considering these questions, we frequently consider the investor’s viewpoint as well, since understanding the motivations and incentives faced by one’s counterparty is critical to avoiding financing pitfalls and negotiating the best financing outcome for one’s venture.

While some of the EF course material builds on topics introduced in TEM and FIN1/FIN2, this is not a remedial entrepreneurship course, nor is it a follow-on corporate finance course. For example, since an understanding of a company’s cash flow needs is central to understanding how to make financing decisions, we will spend time at the start of the course developing an analytical cash flow framework that will be used throughout the course. EF will place greater emphasis on the people involved in startups than a finance course typically does, as human capital is an important driver of value in startups in ways that do not show up on financial statements.

Course Content and Organization:

Module 1: Business Models and Cash Needs

Module 1 introduces two frameworks that are used through the course. The first framework, People-Opportunity-Context-Deal (POCD), provides a way to systematically evaluate early-stage ventures as a potential investor or entrepreneur. The second, three/multi-stage cash flow model, helps understand how a venture’s business model impacts projected cash flows and its need for external finance. All financing decisions follow from strategic and cash-flow considerations. This module provides a foundational understanding from both the entrepreneur and the VC perspective that we will build on for the rest of the course.

Module 2: Founding Decisions and Equity Mechanics

Module 2 covers early-stage practical considerations including initial equity allocation decisions, founder agreements, and employee options. We then dive into the mechanics of equity investments, including both unpriced securities (SAFEs, convertible notes) and priced rounds. We also explore how to go about the initial steps of fundraising and how to think about how much is “enough” to get started.

Module 3: Negotiation and Financing the Messy Middle

Starting in Module 3 and continuing through the rest of the semester, we will have guests in almost every class. In this module, we will cover all of the relevant deal terms involved in term sheet negotiations and dedicate time to more complicated, real-world financing situations. Entrepreneurship inevitably involves setbacks and this module will explore how to navigate negotiation, down rounds, bridge rounds, recapitalizations, dilution, and venture debt.

Module 4: Financing Entrepreneurial Solutions to World Problems

By the end of Module 3, you will have confronted much of the good, the bad, and the ugly of entrepreneurial finance. In Module 4, we will consider the role of entrepreneurial finance in solving the world’s problems. The module will explore entrepreneurs and investors taking different approaches to addressing problems in healthcare, financing inclusion, economic development, and the environment.

Module 5: Managing Exits and Team Project Presentations

Module 5 closes the course by covering the three ways shareholders can achieve liquidity: secondaries, M&A, and public listings. We will explore the mechanisms, tradeoffs, and how the promise of liquidity (eventually) underpins the rest of the startup ecosystem.

Grading / Course Administration:

EF is an elective and I presume you are enrolled because you are committed to learning this (at-times technical) material. I expect all students to be prepared for every class and to submit all pre-class assignments. These assignments are designed to give you practice with the concepts before class and will be used to establish cold calls. While you are welcome to work with classmates to prepare for class, I will expect you to be able to walk the class through your approach to the problem live in class. If you had a bad night or experienced an unavoidable disruption, please let me know before class starts.

Grading is based 40% on class participation (style, timing, quality, and quantity all are factored in with a strong emphasis on quality), 40% on a team-based final project, and 20% on the required pre-class assignments (largely graded on whether a good-faith effort was made, rather than whether the answers were correct).

We will have case protagonists as guests in more than half of the sessions. The objective is to expose you to multiple management styles, perspectives, and personalities. This generally results in shorter class discussions, so your questions to guests will count towards your participation. Please be prepared to ask thoughtful questions that enhance the learning experience for the entire class – if you have individualized requests of the guests, we can work to connect you with the guest outside of class.

Overview:

Entrepreneurial Finance prepares students to navigate the full arc of startup financing—from first check to exit. Whether you plan to start a company, join one early, sit on a board, advise founders, or invest, this course provides the frameworks and judgment to make better financing decisions. We cover the mechanics of SAFEs, priced rounds, and term sheet negotiation, but also the messier realities of down rounds, bridge financing, and venture debt. We cover every step from incorporation to the eventual liquidity events—through secondaries, M&A, and public listings—that underpin the entire startup ecosystem. The course will expose students to the financing realities of a wide variety of businesses and case protagonists join more than half of our sessions, exposing you to the range of management styles and perspectives you'll encounter in practice.

Career Focus:

EF is designed for students who plan to be involved with an entrepreneurial venture, broadly defined, at some point in their career. The course will be relevant whether your involvement is as a founder, early joiner, board member, advisor, or investor. The course is valuable if you are interested in gaining a broader view of the financing landscape, from incorporation through exit markets (and the implications for both private and public equity markets). As Matt Levine frequently noted, “private markets are the new public markets” and EF provides a foundation for how and why private markets function the way they do.

Educational Objectives:

EF introduces students to the complexities of evaluating and financing young, high-potential ventures, with a specific emphasis on the frameworks, tools, deal terms, and varying sources of capital associated with high-growth startup companies. Throughout the course, we will seek to answer the fundamental set of questions all entrepreneurs should ask themselves about their financing strategy: How much capital does the company need to raise at this stage? When should we raise this capital? From whom can and should we raise this capital, and under what terms can we raise it? How can entrepreneurship solve social problems and how should ventures be financed when there are benefits beyond the bottom line? And finally, but crucially, what are the strategic considerations of our financing approach?

Although the course is centered on an entrepreneur’s perspective when considering these questions, we frequently consider the investor’s viewpoint as well, since understanding the motivations and incentives faced by one’s counterparty is critical to avoiding financing pitfalls and negotiating the best financing outcome for one’s venture.

While some of the EF course material builds on topics introduced in TEM and FIN1/FIN2, this is not a remedial entrepreneurship course, nor is it a follow-on corporate finance course. For example, since an understanding of a company’s cash flow needs is central to understanding how to make financing decisions, we will spend time at the start of the course developing an analytical cash flow framework that will be used throughout the course. EF places greater emphasis on people and strategy than a typical finance course, as human capital is an important driver of value in startups in ways that do not show up on financial statements.

Course Content and Organization:

The Fall half-course will have 14 sessions. It is structured as a mix of case studies and practical problem sets across five modules:

Module 1: Business Models and Cash Needs (3 Classes, 1 Guest)

Module 1 introduces the three-factor cash flow model, which illuminates the relationship between business model decisions and the need for external finance. All financing decisions follow from strategic and cash-flow considerations. This module provides a foundational understanding from both the entrepreneur and the VC perspective that we will build on for the rest of the course.

Module 2: Founding Decisions and Equity Mechanics (3 Classes, 1 Guest)

Module 2 covers early-stage practical considerations including initial equity allocation decisions, founder agreements, and employee options. We then dive into the mechanics of equity investments, including both unpriced securities (SAFEs, convertible notes) and priced rounds. We also explore how to go about the initial steps of fundraising and how to think about how much is “enough” to get started.

Module 3: Negotiation and Financing the Messy Middle (5 Classes, 4 Guests)

In this module, we will cover all the relevant deal terms involved in term sheet negotiations and dedicate time to more complicated, real-world financing situations. Entrepreneurship inevitably involves setbacks and this module will explore how to navigate negotiation, down rounds, bridge rounds, recapitalizations, dilution, and venture debt.

Module 4: Liquidity and Exits (2 Classes, 1 Guest)

Module 4 closes the course by covering the three ways shareholders can achieve liquidity: secondaries, M&A, and public listings. We will explore the mechanisms, tradeoffs, and how the promise of liquidity (eventually) underpins the rest of the startup ecosystem.

During the second half of the course, you will work in teams to develop a financial plan for a startup, in the form of models based on our class frameworks and a presentation.

Grading / Course Administration:

EF is an elective and I presume you are enrolled because you are committed to learning this material. I expect all students to be prepared for every class. While you are welcome to work with classmates to prepare for class, I will expect you to be able to walk the class through your approach to the problem live in class. If you had a bad night or experienced an unavoidable disruption, please let me know before class starts.

Grading is based 40% on class participation (style, timing, quality, and quantity all are factored in with a strong emphasis on quality), 40% on a final group project, and 20% on the submitted problem sets (graded based on completion as long as a good-faith effort was made).

Course Content Keywords:

Entrepreneurial Finance, Venture Capital, Private Markets, Equity Financing, Entrepreneurship, Investing

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

‘Nothing happens until a sale is made’

Nothing happens until a sale is made. That simple point underlines the critical importance of sales. Every operating model and business plan ‘assumes’ a certain amount of sales, but that assumption is the tipping point. Without sales, the entire model is an exercise in frustration and futility.

The purpose of this course is to demystify sales and help you understand how to sell products and services within entrepreneurial settings. The course material is applicable whether you become an entrepreneur, venture capitalist, management consultant, general manager, product manager, salesperson, or sales manager. The course is geared toward entrepreneurial settings, specifically execution required by the founder. However, the best practices are applicable to larger company requirements as well.

“The #1 skill HBS alums wish they had spent more time understanding at school was how to sell.”
-Dean Nohria

Entrepreneurs and general managers must not only understand the sales process but also embrace that the ability to sell is the single most critical success factor of any new enterprise. This course does not approach sales from the vaunted perspective of ‘strategy’. It gets right into the very practical and tactical ins and outs of how to sell as a founder. In a larger sense, the entrepreneur and general manager must “sell” his or her vision to prospective employees, to angel and venture investors, and to strategic partners. While all true and all necessary, this course focuses mainly on selling to customers, whether that is through a direct sales force, a channel sales force, or building an OEM relationship. Sales is the one function that cannot hide behind the veil of corporate doubletalk; sales goals are either made or not made. Every organizational activity leverages off that single fact. Markets are not totally rational organizations and the firms with the best sales teams will usually win.

“Superior sales and distribution by itself can create a monopoly, even with no product differentiation. The converse is not true. No matter how strong your product, even if it easily fits into already established habits and anybody who tries it likes it immediately, you must still support it with a strong distribution plan.”
-From “Zero to One” by Peter Thiel

One common misconception is that product innovation alone is a winning tactic. It is not. Often the critical success factor is exactly how a firm goes to market – with its sales force. But the rules have changed – innovations like ‘product-led-growth’ models and social media are changing the status quo and forcing managers to consider new way to structure and incent sales teams.

CLASS REQUIREMENTS

Preparation and class participation are a requirement. We will cold call students to open each class. Every class is associated with a short assignment, and all students are required to be ready to discuss the assigned material.

Sales is a highly experiential, hands on skill that requires role playing and iterative practice to master. As such, Founder Selling uses a more experiential pedagogy during the semester. Unlike most courses at HBS, there is no final exam or final project. Instead, we will run seven experiential assignments, largely executed outside of the classroom, in parallel with the classroom sessions. You will learn how to book appointments, run the first sales meeting, demonstrate your product and service, close large complex deals, and run renewal and expansion calls. In addition to the course faculty, students will be assigned to a sales coach who will review assignment submissions with the course faculty and be available for one-on-one coaching after each assignment.

Class sessions will be 80 minutes long and will be largely be executed in three parts: a cold call opening in which a student presents his/her course of action as outlined in the case, class discussion of the case, and a presentation by the professor to emphasize the key leanings from the case. More than one unexcused absence will affect your final grade.

Copyright © 2023 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

‘Nothing happens until a sale is made’

Nothing happens until a sale is made. That simple point underlines the critical importance of sales. Every operating model and business plan ‘assumes’ a certain amount of sales, but that assumption is the tipping point. Without sales, the entire model is an exercise in frustration and futility.

The purpose of this course is to demystify sales and help you understand how to manage go-to-market functions within entrepreneurial settings. The course material is applicable whether you become an entrepreneur, venture capitalist, management consultant, general manager, product manager, salesperson, or sales manager. The course is geared toward entrepreneurial settings, specifically execution required by the founder, investor, or advisor. However, the best practices are applicable to larger company requirements as well.

“The #1 skill HBS alums wish they had spent more time understanding at school was how to sell.”
-Dean Nohria

This course explores the complex subject of how to build, manage, and scale the first sales force including how to:

• Hire your first salesperson and sales leader
• Develop a scalable demand generation program
• Pay your first salesperson
• Train, manage, promote, and fire your first sales team
• Establish your first sales plan
• Manage the board’s expectations on revenue
• Instrument an accurate forecasting model

“Superior sales and distribution by itself can create a monopoly, even with no product differentiation. The converse is not true. No matter how strong your product, even if it easily fits into already established habits and anybody who tries it likes it immediately, you must still support it with a strong distribution plan.”
-From “Zero to One” by Peter Thiel

One common misconception is that product innovation alone is a winning tactic. It is not. Often the critical success factor is exactly how a firm goes to market – with its sales force. But the rules have changed – innovations like ‘product-led-growth’ models and social media are changing the status quo and forcing managers to consider new way to structure and incent sales teams.

CLASS REQUIREMENTS

Preparation and class participation are a requirement. We will cold call students to open each class. Every class is associated with a short assignment, and all students are required to be ready to discuss the assigned material.

Sales management is a highly experiential, hands on skill that requires role playing and iterative practice to master. As such, Entrepreneurial Sales 102 uses a more experiential pedagogy during the semester. Unlike most courses at HBS, there is no final exam or final project. Instead, we will experiential assignments, largely executed outside of the classroom, in parallel with the classroom sessions.

Class sessions will be 80 minutes long and will be largely be executed in three parts: a cold call opening in which a student presents his/her course of action as outlined in the case, class discussion of the case, and a presentation by the professor to emphasize the key leanings from the case. More than one unexcused absence will affect your final grade.

Entrepreneurial Sales 101 is recommended but not required for this course, as 102 builds on many of the concepts introduced in 101. There is minimal overlap between Entrepreneurial Sales 101 and 102.

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Career Focus

The course will equip students with a deep understanding of why the world looks as it does today, and through describing the challenges, opportunities and ethical challenges that some of the most important as well as controversial business leaders of the last century have faced, provides a unique opportunity to learn from the past in order to chart a better future.

Course Content and Organization

EGC is best seen as a journey, which grows in complexity and depth as students debate contested and sensitive topics. The course challenges students to think of business not in a vacuum, but in a rich context considering competitive landscapes, information asymmetries, conflicting interests, institutional and legal gaps, geopolitics, and cultural differences across countries. The five modules of the course provide a dynamic framework for exploring the challenging decisions entrepreneurs have faced in the different eras of globalization. The roles of business leaders in inflection points, including Nazi Germany, the struggle for Indian independence, apartheid-era South Africa, and conflicts in the Middle East, are examined. The cases, set across centuries, continents and industries, explore how different contexts and regulations have provided incentives for entrepreneurs to develop businesses in either productive or unproductive ways. Cases of stellar business success are accompanied by cases on morally-challenged figures, and conflicting views on the responsibilities of business are debated in widely differing settings. A highly diverse set of business leaders emerge as important actors shaping how local economies and the global economy have evolved. A typical class will try to get into the minds of the protagonists, establish the context in which they took decisions, debate the legacy of those decisions, and discuss how the class would have acted in those circumstances.

The five modules of the course are: First Global Economy; Globalization Reversed; Origins of Second Global Economy; Second Global Economy; New Deglobalization.

Course Administration

Course grades will be based on class participation (50%) and a final self-scheduled exam (50%). A paper can be substituted for the final exam. Throughout the semester, Professor Jones will be available to meet with students. To arrange a meeting, please contact Professor Jones directly, preferably by email (gjones@hbs.edu).

(Please note that this course was previously called Entrepreneurship in the Life Sciences; it is the same course but the title has been updated.)

Overview:

The Entrepreneurship and Innovation in the Life Sciences (EILS) course focuses on the role of individuals in creating, engaging with, operating or investing in new life sciences ventures. The course is primarily designed for students who are interested in exploring innovation within the life sciences, including ideation, generating and/or licensing intellectual property, selecting and developing business models, resourcing ventures with the appropriate financial and human resources, scaling and operating businesses. Its particular emphasis will be on exploring areas within the biotech and pharmaceutical, diagnostics, medical device and related tools and technologies businesses that are ripe for innovation and entrepreneurship. The course is based on the fact that life sciences ventures face high levels of scientific, clinical and commercial pathway uncertainty, and these uncertainties present many opportunities for entrepreneurial innovation.

EILS is intended to enrich students’ understanding of the unique and specific characteristics and challenges of innovating in the life sciences. EILS will pay particular attention to the ways in which entrepreneurship and innovation in the life sciences require additional and different skills and analytic approaches from other types of ventures. This course has been specifically designed for students who are considering founding, joining or investing in life sciences ventures upon, or soon after, graduation.

EILS also pays considerable attention to the background and career paths of each of the case protagonists and speakers, most of whom will also be in class for the case discussions. The purpose of this is to give students an understanding of the many approaches one can take to both enter and succeed in the life sciences industry. In an industry as large as life sciences which also requires a broad range of skills, EILS seeks to help students think through the career path that makes the most sense for them given their particular backgrounds and aspirations.

While EILS is intended primarily for students who have a career interest in either starting or joining life sciences ventures, it will also be of interest for students interested in investing in life sciences and related healthcare ventures. While the course is focused on the life sciences, students need not have a scientific background, merely a passion for making an impact through participation in these ventures.

Career Focus:

Life sciences ventures face high levels of scientific, clinical and commercial pathway uncertainty, and these uncertainties present many opportunities for entrepreneurial innovation. This course is primarily designed for students who are interested in exploring opportunities to innovate within the life sciences, including exploring ideation, generating and/or licensing intellectual property, business models, resourcing ventures with the appropriate financial and human resources, and scaling. The course will explore which areas of life sciences are ripe for innovation and entrepreneurship and will cover therapeutics, devices, diagnostics, and related service providers, data, tools and technologies. Example topics of exploration may include emerging opportunities in pharma & biotech, medical device & diagnostics advances, and related topics such as digital therapeutics, platform technologies, use of real-world evidence, data and computing, AI and GenAI, decentralized clinical trials, the role of life sciences incubators, contract research/manufacturing organizations etc.

The course will introduce you to the complex issues involved in the regulation of the life sciences and the commercialization of regulated products. Considering that life sciences R&D is an extensively regulated area, we will focus on the critical decisions that managers need to make to gain regulatory approval during each step of the process, and in financing and commercializing the approved products.

The course will introduce you to the tools, technology and the outsourcing ecosystem of the life sciences. Considering that the life sciences R&D organizations extensively use software and hardware tools to generate a variety of R&D data, and are also increasingly using outsourcing services, we will expand upon the tools and technology landscape, and the contract research and manufacturing outsourcing ecosystem.

The course will introduce you to the use of healthcare and related data in advancing life sciences R&D. With the increasing use of healthcare (patient health records, prescription data, etc.), lab and other R&D data in life sciences R&D, ELS will explore topics such as Real World Data and Real World Evidence used for various aspects of life sciences R&D and commercialization.

The course will familiarize you with the major sources of capital available to life science companies and the expectations of investors. Through interactive discussions, we will see how the (dilutive and non-dilutive) sources of capital and expectations of investors differ depending on the type of venture. We will also explore the value inflection points that investors look for while evaluating funding decisions for ventures in life sciences. In addition to financial capital, the course will also expand on the nature and type of human capital required for a successful entrepreneurial venture.

The course will cause you to look introspectively at what career path and long-term career objectives make the most sense for you given your background, interests, and aspirations. Some of you have backgrounds and experience in the life sciences industry. Others of you have liberal arts backgrounds and limited industry experience. By virtue of your exposure to a wide variety of life sciences entrepreneurs and investors, you will be able to reflect on what set of experiences is most likely to allow you to achieve your career aspirations. And while EILS is not a career course, we enthusiastically acknowledge that the course may help to clarify some career concerns for you.

Educational Objectives:

This course has been specifically designed for students who are considering founding or joining life sciences ventures upon, or soon after, graduation. This course covers many topics that are also important to students interested in working in or investing in the life sciences. While the course is focused on the life sciences, students need not have a scientific background, merely a passion for making an impact through participation in these ventures. The primary objective of this course is to enable students to explore entrepreneurship and careers within the life sciences. Students will explore opportunities along various aspects of the R&D and commercialization lifecycle, along science, clinical, regulatory and commercial areas of the lifecycle. Numerous students in this course have gone on to win coveted Blavatnik Fellowships.

Key Learning Objectives include:

• Understand key business models for life sciences innovation

• Understand macro trends driving innovation in the life sciences, including the impact of emerging bioconvergence topics at the intersection of the life sciences, data and computing

• Define roadmaps for life sciences R&D and products, incorporating intellectual property concerns, clinical and regulatory pathways to commercialization.

• Explore financing sources, including early grants and non-dilutive financing sources, to equity financing

• Identify best practices for building life sciences teams

Class tools include case and/or lecture-based discussions based on a variety of life sciences ventures, including those in biotech, pharmaceutical, medical device, diagnostics, and related supporting technology and services organizations. In most classes, we will have case protagonists and guests, including life sciences entrepreneurs, investors and domain experts so you can engage directly with these practitioners from the burgeoning life sciences venture ecosystem.

Course Content and Organization:

EILS is structured into four modules:

The Path to Getting Started, Securing Intellectual Property and Resourcing the Venture

Understanding Clinical and Regulatory Environments and Operations

Exploring Business Models in Outsourcing, Data, Tools and Technologies

Understanding Corporate/Business Development, Manufacturing and Commercialization (including Pricing) Considerations

The details of what you will learn, of course, will emerge as you prepare and discuss the cases and readings in each module. The following paragraphs, however, summarize the general perspective of each element of the course.

The Path to Entrepreneurship, Getting Started, Securing Intellectual Property and Resourcing the Venture

We begin the course by looking at the journey of a scientist creating an entrepreneurial biopharma venture based on his research. We will examine his career and ask: Is there a best background/career path for a life sciences entrepreneur? Are the requirements for a successful life sciences venture different from the requirements for other types of ventures? This module will also explore the key topics of getting started as an entrepreneur in the life sciences, namely, where can one look for ideas, how to decide which markets and indications to pursue, company design, platform plays and related topics.

A distinguishing feature of innovation in life science businesses is that they are based on intellectual property. How one secures and protects IP are the subjects of this module. Through an interactive in-class workshop, we will explore the process of technology licensing, the risks of patent infringement, and the appropriate role of patents in groundbreaking core technologies. Among the questions explored are:

• What are the major sources of IP?

• What rules govern the relationship between government-funded R&D, universities, and corporations?

• What is the role of a university’s Technology Licensing Office?

• What recourse is available when IP is infringed?

Beyond IP, life science ventures have a very broad range of potential sources of capital. Beyond traditional venture capital and private equity, interested angels, compassionate groups, governmental bodies and large corporations can help fund a life sciences start-up. In the first module and throughout the course, we will look at a variety of approaches that entrepreneurs and managers have taken to finance their ventures as well as:

• Who are the major investors in life science ventures?

• How do financing options or approaches differ per life science segment?

• What are the pros and cons of each funding alternative, including those for for-profit and non-profit organizations?

• What role does partnering, licensing and business development play in financing the venture?

Understanding the Clinical and Regulatory Environments and Operations

While securing IP is a necessary condition for life science ventures, it is not sufficient. Because of regulatory requirements, all new medical devices or chemical entities require governmental approval. The purpose of this module is less to learn the full maze of regulations governing drug and device approval, but more to learn the ways in which the regulatory process can be managed. The design of a clinical trial requires both scientific and managerial judgments. Regulatory approval is both a substantive and political process. And throughout the process, numerous ethical challenges can arise. The cases in this module address this full gamut of issues.

Exploring Business Models in Outsourcing, Data, Tools and Technologies

In this module, we will explore business models in use of healthcare and related patient data, along with emerging artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies, outsourcing to contract research, development and manufacturing organizations, life science tools and technologies and related areas.

Understanding Corporate/Business Development, Manufacturing and Commercialization Considerations

In addition, in no other industry is the role of corporate strategy and development, including the business development function, so central to the strategy of the firm as it is in the life sciences. For life science start-ups, business development is often critical to the survival of the venture. The cases in this module range from straightforward to very complicated business development deals. Among the topics addressed are:

• How are business development alternatives valued?

• How can business development be used as a major source of venture funding?

• What are the particular problems start-ups face when negotiating with large life sciences companies?

• How are business development, partnerships and commercialization inter-linked and how should a startup incorporate these activities into a corporate development strategy?

Finally, EILS will also examine topics related to manufacturing, commercialization, and pricing within the life sciences industry.

A sample syllabus from Fall 2025 is linked here as a representative sample of class content. Note: this may likely change for Fall 2026.

Grading / Course Administration:

Grading will be a combination of class engagement (50%), assignments (20%) and a final project (30%).

Course Content Keywords:

Life Sciences, Healthcare, Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Pharma, Biotech, Medical Devices, Medical Technology, Diagnostics, AI.

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved

Click here for a sample syllabus for this course

Overview

The nonprofit arts and culture industry generates more than $166.billions of economic activity in the US—approximately $64 billion in spending by arts and cultural organizations and an additional $103 billion in event-related expenditures by their audiences. This activity supports 4.6 million jobs. A report by the Conference Board noted that in addition to the enormous financial impact of the sector, “companies consider the arts to be important in building quality of life, stimulating creative thinking and problem solving, and offering networking opportunities and the potential to develop new business and build market share.”

Business of the Arts (BOTA) is designed to introduce students to the key issues faced by leaders in this important economic sector.

Career Focus:

This course is intended both for students focused on leadership careers in the nonprofit cultural industries and those interested in serving on the boards of arts organizations. The course also provides useful insights and frameworks for students pursuing careers in a range of for-profit creative businesses including film, television, and music.

Course Content and Organization

The course utilizes three approaches to learning—traditional case-based classes, talks by key arts leaders, and consulting assignments with Boston-area arts organizations.

Cases: Cases and required background reading cover leadership issues encountered by an extensive range of arts and cultural institutions both in the United States and abroad (e.g. the Louvre, Jazz @ Lincoln Center, the Los Angeles Philharmonic).

Guest Talks: Students will hear firsthand from a number of case protagonists who will discuss the challenges and opportunities they face as leaders of cultural organizations.

Projects: Students will assemble into five-person teams to work on projects throughout the course. Project partners include a wide variety of Boston-area arts and cultural institutions. Each project will focus on solving a specific and well-defined strategic or operational challenge currently facing the organization. The projects will require extensive data collection and analysis.

Performances: Students will have the opportunity to attend performances by several well-known arts organizations including the American Repertory Theater, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and the Boston Ballet.,

Non-Disclosure Agreements: Partner organizations will provide student teams with confidential information. Students will be required to sign a confidentiality and intellectual property assignment agreement.

Grading / Course Administration

Deliverables: The course will have five deliverables: (1) Team Launch Document (2) Situation Analysis, (3) Preliminary Draft of Partner Presentation, (4) Final Partner Presentation, and (5) Individual Learning Reflection.

Grading: Each student’s grade will be based on (1) Class Participation, (2) Quality of Team Deliverables, (3) Partner Input, (4) Team Member Peer Evaluation, and (5) Quality of Individual Learning Reflection.

Pre-Requisites

None

Cross-Registration

A limited number of places may be available for cross-registrants.

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Advisors: Executive Fellow Richard Boxer, MD; Executive Fellow Divya Srungaram, HBS MBA

Overview:

This course enables you to fund your seed round, obtain non-dilutive funding, and/or enter in formal beta site commitments with highly likely customers.

For example, in 2025, teams obtained $5 million in seed funding and won the HBS Shark Tank prize; Grand Prize of the Social Enterprise track at the New Ventures Competition; the iF Gold Design Award; and a Blavatnik Fellowship. Another team launched its innovation in thirty clinics. (Results from the 2026 class are in progress and promising; updates will be provided following course completion.)

Students can expect to:

1. Review their existing business, opportunities, and challenges, and develop strategies for sustained success, including testing various go-to-market strategies and their customer acquisition costs through extensive field work. The teaching team will do their best to assure that the relevant doors are opened to you.
2. Delineate your goals and activities for the next class meeting.
3. Present your progress to the class, in PowerPoint, and ask for the specific feedback you desire. The teaching team will review your work as mentors.
4. Give feedback to other highly motivated student teams and specify what you learned from giving feedback.
5. Interact with expert lecturers on relevant topics such as IP strategies, VC funding, non-dilutive funding sources, etc.
6. Receive feedback and counsel from outside business advisors, who either advised you in the Fall Q1 course or are new connections to your team.
7. Practice their pitch presentations before seasoned investors in the relevant fields.

This course gives you an opportunity to work on something of great interest to you, like an Independent Project course, but preserves many of the benefits of a larger course, including opportunities for guest speakers, development of a network, feedback from your peers, and clearly delineated deliverables and milestones.

The course is designed to enable students to develop and grow the business plans they developed in “Innovating in Health Care” (Course 2815, Fall Q1), which is a prerequisite to this course.

Career Focus:

This sequence of Innovating in Health Care courses focuses on enabling careers in healthcare entrepreneurship in any health care vertical: digital health, life sciences, insurance, interoperability, and delivery of clinical care.

Educational Objectives:

The creation of a viable business plan that innovates healthcare. “Viable” means that students will obtain funding and/or participation in pilots of their innovation in top-ranked institutions, and/or significant partnerships, and relevant IP protection by the end of this three-course sequence.

The course enables this ambitious objective through:

1. Grounding in the friends and enemies in the health care ecosystem – and their likely impact on the innovation.
2. Developing strategies that can convert enemies into friends and friends into supporters.
3. Fashioning viable GTM and CAC strategies for starting, scaling, and exiting a health care innovation.
4. Building a support network with the many powerful stakeholders who are guests in the courses: they can help enable funding, contacts, and sound operating advice.
5. Creating a life-long network of colleagues with your fellow classmates.

Course Content and Organization:

Each week the students present updates on their progress toward creating a compelling business plan and launching a viable startup in the healthcare industry. The class, teaching team, and any invited guest engage in group discussion and feedback as to identifying obstacles, providing support, and advising on next steps.

Occasional guest lectures or presentations on the teaching team provide background, analysis, and suggestions on relevant topics such as launching a pilot at a healthcare provider or securing venture capital funding.

Class topics and invited guests are geared toward the needs of students and their projects. Content will vary based on the types of startups and degree of student progress.

Grading / Course Administration:

Grades are based on informed, helpful participation in case discussion; support of fellow students; and your progress in creating a viable business plan.

Students are reminded of the Class Absence and Remote Attendance Policy

Enrollment: Limited to 16 student projects, including cross-registrants. The cross-registrants bring their skills in medicine, medical technology, bioscience, and digital and public health to this course.

Course Content Keywords:

Health care entrepreneurship, venture capital/PE funding, GTM/CAC strategies, FDA regulation, insurance reimbursement, Medicare/Medicaid reimbursement, digital health, interoperability, care coordination, IP protection, EMRs, CROs

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved

Advisors: Executive Fellow Richard Boxer, MD; Executive Fellow Divya Srungaram, HBS MBA

Overview:

The course is designed to enable students to develop and grow the business plans they developed in “Innovating in Health Care” (Course 2815, Fall Q1), which is a prerequisite to this course.

Students can expect to:

1. Review their existing business plan, its opportunities and challenges, and develop strategies for sustained success, including testing various go-to-market strategies and their customer acquisition costs through extensive field work. The teaching team will do their best to assure that the relevant doors are opened to you.
2. Present your progress toward your goals to the class every two weeks, in a PowerPoint, and ask for the specific feedback you desire. The teaching team will review your work as mentors.
3. Give feedback to your fellow highly motivated student teams and specify what you learned from giving feedback.
4. Interact with expert lecturers on relevant topics such as IP strategies, VC funding, non-dilutive funding sources, obtaining a pilot site etc.
5. Receive advice from expert business mentors, who either advised you in the Fall Q1 course or are new connections to your team.

This course gives you an opportunity to work on something of great interest to you, like an Independent Project course, but preserves many of the benefits of a larger course, including opportunities for guest speakers, development of a network, feedback from your peers, and clearly delineated deliverables and milestones.

A substantial number of “Innovating in Health Care” businesses have been funded by mentors and investors they met through the course.

Career Focus:

This sequence of Innovating in Health Care courses focuses on enabling careers in healthcare entrepreneurship in any health care vertical: digital health, life sciences, insurance, interoperability, and delivery of clinical care.

Educational Objectives:

The creation of a viable business plan that innovates healthcare. “Viable” means that students will obtain funding and/or participation in pilots of their innovation in top-ranked institutions, and/or significant partnerships, and relevant IP protection by the end of this three-course sequence.

The course enables this ambitious objective through:

1. Grounding in the friends and enemies in the health care ecosystem – and their likely impact on the innovation.
2. Developing strategies that can convert enemies into friends and friends into supporters.
3. Fashioning viable GTM and CAC strategies for starting, scaling, and exiting a health care innovation.
4. Building a support network with the many powerful stakeholders who are guests in the courses: they can help enable funding, contacts, and sound operating advice.
5. Creating a life-long network of colleagues with your fellow classmates.

Course Content and Organization:

Each week the students present updates on their progress toward creating a compelling business plan and launching a viable startup in the healthcare industry. The class, teaching team, and any invited guest engage in group discussion and feedback as to identifying obstacles, providing support, and advising on next steps.

Occasional guest lectures or presentations on the teaching team provide background, analysis, and suggestions on relevant topics such as launching a pilot at a healthcare provider or securing venture capital funding.

Class topics and invited guests are geared toward the needs of students and their projects. Content will vary based on the types of startups and degree of student progress.

Grading / Course Administration:

Grades are based on informed, helpful participation in case discussion; support of fellow students; and your progress in creating a viable business plan.

Students are reminded of the Class Absence and Remote Attendance Policy

Enrollment: Limited to 16 student projects, including cross-registrants. The cross-registrants bring their skills in medicine, medical technology, bioscience, and digital and public health to this course.

Course Content Keywords:

Health care entrepreneurship, venture capital/PE funding, GTM/CAC strategies, FDA regulation, insurance reimbursement, Medicare/Medicaid reimbursement, digital health, interoperability, care coordination, IP protection, EMRs, CROs

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved

This course teaches specific practical skills that are required to become an effective entrepreneur through acquisition. The course is not a case-based course. It will meet weekly and students will be required to complete assignments on topics relevant to buying a small company such as how to screen potential acquisition targets, the likely types, terms and amounts of debt financing, the typical deal terms and the items open to negotiations, the sources of equity investments, including search funds, private equity partnerships and individual investors. We will also learn about the due diligence process and legal concerns when buying a smaller company. We will have guests in most classes who have practical, hands-on experience.

The course will have practical exercises designed to help entrepreneurs complete their acquisitions. These include pitching to potential equity investors, prospecting for potential targets, seller cold calls and negotiating bank loans.

The seminar is designed for students with a serious interest in buying a small company early in their careers.

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Overview:

Field X is a course designed to enable students to develop and grow their businesses. Doing so while on campus has several advantages: access to resources, advice from your peers in a structured environment, and devoted blocks of time during your EC year to move your business forward. The course employs a combination of field methods, classroom exercises, cross-team interactions, and access to faculty/guest experts/other advisors. The largest single allocation of time is for working with your team to make meaningful progress on your own business. This course can be thought of as occupying a space between an IP and a traditional course, giving you an opportunity to work on something of great interest to you, while preserving many of the benefits of a larger course, including opportunities for guest speakers, feedback from your peers, and clearly delineated deliverables and milestones that act as commitment devices to push the business forward.

Career Focus:

Field X is suitable for anyone interested in entrepreneurship: whether you want to be a founder or a joiner, which is a student who works with an already established team for the semester. Field X is not geared towards any one type of business; we always have teams working in the consumer, healthcare, finance, real estate, tech, arts and entertainment, AI, and social enterprise industries. If you are a student who is sufficiently excited about a business you are running, or a business you want to start immediately, and you want to focus on it in a serious way, Field X would be a great fit for you. For some, because they treasure the lessons they are learning from building a business. For some, because they think their business has a legitimate opportunity to grow rapidly and create a successful career path for them. And for others because they believe their business can do a substantial amount of good for the world and so they want to continue working on it during their EC year and perhaps after graduation.

Educational Objectives:

Students can expect to:

Summarize and critique their existing business, its strengths and weaknesses, and set priorities for moving the business forward, including the most pressing priorities to be addressed during the course itself.

Develop a strategy for taking the business to the next level, including a plan for funding, and a plan and timeline for reaching scale.

Give and receive feedback from other highly motivated student teams.

Meet frequently as a team with the faculty advisor.

Receive feedback and counsel from outside business advisors.

Have opportunities to pitch your work to angel, seed, and venture capital investors.

A substantial number of Field X businesses have been funded by mentors and investors they met through the course. Dozens of teams from previous semesters are running their businesses full-time now, most of whom have received funding of $500,000 or more, in some cases far more!

Course Content and Organization:

Because Field X is “in between an IP and a course” that means that there will be weekly class meetings, but there will not, in general, be substantial weekly homework or required preparation for class, other than that you work to push your business forward. Each class is organized into two parts: an interactive talk with a luminary, followed by in-class office hours where student teams get to meet either 1:1 or in small groups with industry experts and course mentors to get their advice on their businesses. Past speakers have included venture capitalist Tim Draper, Shark Tank's Kevin O'Leary, entrepreneurs like Yvonne Hao of PillPack and Charles Curran of Armored Things, and many others with wisdom to share!

Grading / Course Administration:

The main deliverable is the team’s final presentation with accompanying slide deck and written report. There will also be intermediate deliverables building up to that point. In short, students can expect to produce a Word document and a PowerPoint deck with descriptions of your business at the beginning of the course and a (perhaps similar, perhaps very different) version at the end of the course.

On the final day of class, students who wish to have the opportunity to present their business to an audience of angel, seed and venture investors at our Pitch Day event. At our most recent Pitch Day, over 300 investors and industry leaders attended. After the pitching portion of the event, there is a catered reception which is an opportunity for students to network with these investors and industry leaders.

Course Content Keywords: Entrepreneurship, Venture Creation, Startups, Venture Capital, Mentorship, Business Strategy, Growth & Scaling, Experiential Learning, Pitching, Innovation

Copyright © 2024 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Overview:

Field Y: Projects in Business Management welcomes both students who have taken Field X and those who have not. If we reach the enrollment limit, preference will be given to students who took Field X. Field Y is a course designed to enable students to develop and grow their businesses. Doing so while on campus has several advantages: access to resources, advice from your peers in a structured environment, and devoted blocks of time during your EC year to move your business forward. The course employs a combination of field methods, classroom exercises, cross-team interactions, and access to faculty/guest experts/other advisors. The largest single allocation of time is for working with your team to make meaningful progress on your own business. This course can be thought of as occupying a space between an IP and a traditional course, giving you an opportunity to work on something of great interest to you, while preserving many of the benefits of a larger course, including opportunities for guest speakers, feedback from your peers, and clearly delineated deliverables and milestones that act as commitment devices to push the business forward.

Career Focus:

Field Y is suitable for students who took Field X and are still running and growing their businesses as well as students who are starting and/or running businesses in Spring of their EC year who did not take Field X. Ultimately, anyone interested in entrepreneurship would get a lot out of this course: whether you want to be a founder or a joiner, which is a student who works with an already established team for the semester. Field Y is not geared towards any one type of business; we always have teams working in the consumer, healthcare, finance, real estate, tech, arts and entertainment, AI, and social enterprise industries. If you are a student who is sufficiently excited about a business you are running, or a business you want to start immediately, and you want to focus on it in a serious way, Field Y would be a great fit for you. For some, because they treasure the lessons they are learning from building a business. For some, because they think their business has a legitimate opportunity to grow rapidly and create a successful career path for them. And for others because they believe their business can do a substantial amount of good for the world and so they want to continue working on it during their EC year and perhaps after graduation.

Educational Objectives:

Students can expect to:

Summarize and critique their existing business, its strengths and weaknesses, and set priorities for moving the business forward, including the most pressing priorities to be addressed during the course itself.

Develop a strategy for taking the business to the next level, including a plan for funding, and a plan and timeline for reaching scale.

Give and receive feedback from other highly motivated student teams.

Meet frequently as a team with the faculty advisor.

Receive feedback and counsel from outside business advisors.

Have opportunities to pitch your work to angel, seed, and venture capital investors.

A substantial number of Field Y businesses have been funded by mentors and investors they met through the course. Dozens of teams from previous semesters are running their businesses full-time now, most of whom have received funding of $500,000 or more, in some cases far more!

Course Content and Organization:

There will be a weekly class meeting, but there will not, in general, be substantial weekly homework or required preparation for class, other than that you work to push your business forward. Each class is organized into two parts: an interactive talk with a luminary, followed by in-class office hours where student teams get to meet either 1:1 or in small groups with industry experts and course mentors to get their advice on their businesses. Past speakers have included venture capitalist Tim Draper, Shark Tank's Kevin O'Leary, entrepreneurs like Yvonne Hao of PillPack and Charles Curran of Armored Things, and many others with wisdom to share!

Grading / Course Administration:

The main deliverable is the team’s final presentation with accompanying slide deck and written report. There will also be intermediate deliverables building up to that point. In short, students can expect to produce a Word document and a PowerPoint deck with descriptions of your business at the beginning of the course and a (perhaps similar, perhaps very different) version at the end of the course.

On the final day of class, students who wish to have the opportunity to present their business to an audience of angel, seed and venture investors at our Pitch Day event. At our most recent Pitch Day, over 300 investors and industry leaders attended. After the pitching portion of the event, there is a catered reception which is an opportunity for students to network with these investors and industry leaders.

Course Content Keywords: Entrepreneurship, Venture Creation, Startups, Venture Capital, Mentorship, Business Strategy, Growth & Scaling, Experiential Learning, Pitching, Innovation

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved

DROPBOX VIDEO LINK: FIELD Course – Inside the Family Office

Course Overview

*Family Offices are the fastest growing organizational form in financial markets.*

Inside the Family Office is a field immersion course that situates students directly in the seat of making Family Office (FO) decisions. Students will be embedded in Family Offices to engage in live decision-making at the FO. The course will be highly career-centric, and it will apply to students pursuing careers in:

Private Equity

Hedge Funds

Start-ups

Family Offices

Wealth Management

Family Offices are taking leading roles in private and public market investing, early-stage venture investing, policymaking, impact investing, and philanthropic organizations. Thus, the field placement will also serve as an opportunity to harvest connections and create networks to better navigate a diverse set of careers moving ahead.

During their field placement, students are expected to take on a project that addresses one of the core pillars of a Family Office: Succession, Governance, Investments, Organizational Structure, Impact, etc. The partnering family will be responsible for guiding the student on the nature of the project, focused on existing or frontier-exploratory solutions. Examples might include: Outlining shareholder division in a succession plan, forming a philanthropic strategy, or exploring investment into crypto-assets.

A midterm networking event with global families will be part of the course. This will involve a diverse set of families and FO decision-makers that will be visiting campus for the flagship Executive Education Family Office Course.

Virtual or in-person meetings will depend on the family’s global location, as well as the shared preferences of the student and partnering family. There will be roughly weekly classroom sessions throughout the semester, along with a number of touch-point office hours with Professor Cohen throughout.

Who Teaches This Course?

The course will be taught by Professor Cohen, a Top 25 Global Family Enterprise Academic, along with being the Faculty Co-Chair and Designer of the HBS Flagship Family Office Executive Education course ‘Building a Legacy: Family Office Wealth Management.’ Professor Cohen has a joint appointment in the FIN and EM units, specializing in innovation, behavioral finance, and empirical asset pricing. He was named Top 40 Under 40 Business School Professor in 2017 by Poets & Quants, and a top teacher at Harvard by CNBC.

Dr. Cohen frequently advises government organizations in the US and abroad, including the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, United States Patent & Trademark Office, testifying before the United States Congress, and advising governments, central banks, inter-governmental organizations, and sovereign ruling families throughout Europe, Africa, and Asia on matters of Innovation Policy, Impact Investing, Climate Change, Pension Structure, and Family Office Management.

Grading

Grading will be as follows:

• 10% Midterm Networking event (e.g., short write-up of families spoken to, what you learned)

• 20% In-class participation and check-ins

• 30% SWOT analysis of the assigned Family Office

• 40% Final presentation (e.g., learnings, solutions considered, personal reflections, etc.)

Enrollment

The course may be open for cross-registration; enrollment will be limited to 30 students.

There are no pre-requisite courses.

Short FAQ:

Q: Are Family Offices important in capital markets?

A: Yes, as a comparison: the most recent statistics have AUM (assets under management) of the global hedge fund industry at roughly 4.5 trillion dollars. Family Offices, by comparison, have AUM of 3.1 trillion dollars – over 2/3 the size - and growing quickly.

Q: Can I take Inside the Family Office if I don’t have experience with family offices?

A: Yes, Inside the Family Office is designed to be broadly applicable across many career paths for which the familiarity and connections with family offices (e.g., raising funding from and partnering with family offices) will be valuable.

Q: How is the class structured?

A: You will be centrally working alongside the partnering family office. In-class sessions will be a mix of debriefing (common challenges, project progress, next steps, etc.), along with discussion of best-practices.

Q: What if the family office entity hasn’t officially been created?

A: That is ideal in certain ways: in this case, your project will likely entail ground-up thinking through optimal structuring, governance, and asset allocation with the principals of the newly-to-be-formed family office.

Q: Will I need to sign an NDA (non-disclosure agreement)?

A: Given that many families are concerned about privacy, we require that students sign an NDA to ensure that no private information will be released.

Potential Projects

1. Is our portfolio allocation overexposed to certain markets?

2. How should we best use service providers?

3. Which philanthropy pursuit aligns best with our resources and expertise?

4. How are we accounting for the operating company in the family office?

5. What novel asset classes have we neglected?

6. Do we have too much cash?

7. Is the division of family shareholding equitable?

8. Have you considered a succession plan for the upcoming generation?

If you have any questions regarding the course, please feel free to reach out to Sophia Pan at span@hbs.edu.

Course Content Keywords: Family Offices, Investment Management, Private Equity, Philanthropy, Impact Investment, Governance, Seed Investing, Immersion, Career-Focus

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Course Overview:

Investing for Impact (IFI) combines case-based learning with a hands-on field component focused on investing in small businesses in the Boston area. Student teams are partnered with the founders of these small companies to conduct full due diligence (financial, operational, and commercial). At the end of the course, each team will present their findings and recommendations to an Investment Committee of distinguished HBS alumni and impact investing practitioners. The goal of the diligence is to i) evaluate a potential investment of $25,000-$50,000 from the HBS Impact Fund (a few will be selected by the IC based on student recommendations), and ii) help prepare the companies for future diligence processes as their businesses scale. The course works closely with intermediaries in the Boston impact investing ecosystem including BostonXChange (the accelerator started by Jrue & Lauren Holiday and Jaylen Brown), the Boston Impact Initiative, Nectar, and LEAF.

Course Objective:

The course develops students’ ability to assess small, growing businesses that have historically faced barriers to accessing capital. Through cases and fieldwork, students learn how to conduct effective diligence, develop an investment thesis, and communicate recommendations to an investment committee. Students will also learn about the opportunities and challenges of locally-focused impact investing.

A central component of the learning experience is working directly with founders to perform rigorous diligence within a limited timeframe—balancing analytical depth with practical constraints, prioritizing key risks, and translating findings into actionable investment recommendations. Students gain experience in financial, commercial, and operational analysis while engaging with the broader Boston impact investing ecosystem.

Course Format:

The course is delivered in Q2 and integrates case discussions with team-based fieldwork.

Case discussions focus on (i) building the skills required to conduct effective diligence and prepare for an investment committee, and (ii) understanding the role of intermediaries in the Boston impact investing ecosystem.

For the fieldwork component, students are assigned to small teams and matched with a company. Teams work closely with founders throughout the term, conducting diligence and developing a recommendation. The final deliverable is an investment committee presentation (supported by a 12-15 page deck including analysis of the business and market, financial projections, use of funds, and key risks and opportunities) and financial model. In addition, after approval by the IC, teams will communicate summary recommendations to each company in a short memo.

Some class sessions will be reserved for teams to work with their assigned company (e.g. site visits, diligence meetings); some field-based diligence work will also need to be completed outside of class time.

Overview:

Creating, launching and funding life sciences ventures is a difficult and daunting task, especially given recent market conditions. The Field Course: Life Sciences Venture Creation (LSVC) is a practical, hands-on field course primarily designed for students who are very serious about pursuing entrepreneurship within the life sciences and healthcare, including therapeutics, medical devices, diagnostics, health tech, wellness, tools, software & data, contract research/manufacturing and more. The course features workshops with practitioners and domain experts providing guidance and exploring how to successfully navigate critical tasks when launching a life sciences or healthcare venture. These tasks include validating a business idea or technology, creating and protecting intellectual property (including negotiating licenses), developing budgets and timelines, developing business models and resourcing the venture/fundraising, exploring the process of building a syndicate and establishing a board of advisors, finding human talent to accomplish business goals, and more.

Career Focus:

LSVC is intended to enrich students’ understanding of the unique and specific characteristics and challenges of entrepreneurship in the life sciences and healthcare. LSVC will pay particular attention to the ways in which entrepreneurship in the life sciences requires additional and different skills and analytic approaches from other types of ventures. The course is primarily designed for students who are (1) actively pursuing a job or entrepreneurship in the life sciences or healthcare industries post-graduation; or, (2) are already actively working on a life sciences or healthcare company idea or startup; or (3) joining a life sciences or healthcare company and/or are already working part-time during the school year.

Students in this course have gone on to win coveted Blavatnik Fellowships and Rhodes Scholarships, have launched a number of ventures, and have successfully raised venture capital investment.

This field course complements concepts covered in the Entrepreneurship and Innovation in the Life Sciences (EILS) course and all other entrepreneurially-focused courses, but with a specific industry focus on the life sciences and healthcare. The course is based on the fact that these ventures face high levels of technology, scientific, clinical and commercialization uncertainty, and these uncertainties present many opportunities for entrepreneurial innovation.

Educational Objectives:

LSVC has been specifically designed to provide hands-on guidance and operational support for students who are seriously pursuing founding or joining life sciences or healthcare ventures before, upon, or soon after, graduation. Students will learn and develop frameworks, tools, a network, and hands-on experience in critical functions of a life sciences or healthcare startup, directly preparing them for a career in entrepreneurship in these fields. Sessions will feature skill-building workshops led by the instructor and outside experts as well as weekly peer-to-peer critiques on work-in-progress. Students are encouraged to work as a cohort to support each other through their networks and to offer insights based on their own experiences. While the course is focused on the life sciences and healthcare, students need not have a scientific or healthcare background, merely a passion for making an impact through participation in these ventures.

The primary objective of LSVC is to enable students to explore entrepreneurship within the life sciences and healthcare industries. Students will explore opportunities along various aspects of the research and development (R&D) and commercialization lifecycle, along research, product development and commercial areas of the lifecycle. Specific learning objectives for LSVC, based on hands-on experiential learning, are:

• Learning to operate and fund the venture from industry-leading experts
• Avoiding mistakes of others and learning to innovate in the industry
• Navigating careers within the life sciences and healthcare
• Building a brand and community within the industry to leverage for help
• Building budgets; licensing/creating/protecting intellectual property; legal and regulatory considerations
• Fundraising with angel individuals and venture capital funds/investors
• Exploring financing sources and how to practically access them, including early grants, non-dilutive financing sources, equity financing, and more
• Identifying best practices for building teams (incl. compensation structures) & boards
• Exploring ethical considerations while working in a hot-button field.

Course Content and Organization:

Students in LSVC will develop skills across every aspect of the venture creation landscape through hands-on workshops with industry experts and case and/or lecture-based discussions based on a variety of life sciences ventures. Sectors of life sciences covered include those in biotech, pharmaceutical, medical device, diagnostics, and related supporting health tech, wellness, tools, technology and services organizations. Students can work on projects alone or in teams within the course. The field course will explore four different modules:

1. Pre-Requisites to Fundraise - validating an idea, what will investors or grant-making bodies expect you to bring them, and how to build this out in a rational manner that investors will believe; building a business plan; developing budgets and milestones; intellectual property considerations and licensing/creation.
2. When and How to Raise Funds - what do investors care about when considering a pitch, which investors should you target, how to build a syndicate, and which advisors do you want on board; negotiating term sheets.
3. How to Meet Product Development Deadlines - you raised money, and now you need to hit milestones - where and how to build teams or outsource to achieve business goals and have success; optimizing capital efficiency; legal and intellectual property development; regulatory considerations.
4. Industry Challenges and When to Get Help - when should you worry about regulatory concerns? Who do you hire internally or as a consultant? When and if to outsource to contract research or technology outsourcing organizations? How do you know what to worry about when you don't know what you don't know that is unique to life sciences ventures?

In most classes, we will have industry leaders and guests, including life sciences and healthcare entrepreneurs, investors and domain experts so you can engage directly with these practitioners from the burgeoning life sciences and healthcare venture ecosystem.

A sample syllabus from Fall 2025 is linked here as a representative sample of class content. Note: this may likely change for Fall 2026.

Grading / Course Administration:

Grading will be a combination of class engagement (40%), mentorship (bi-weekly summaries of activities, learnings and reflections - 20%), writing assignments (e.g., budget, industry reflections - 20%) and a final written paper (20%).

Overview

Entering its thirteenth year, Private Equity Projects and Ecosystems is a hybrid field and lecture series that provides the opportunity to work hands-on with leading private equity firms on projects of “mutual value” and learn about the many things critical to success in private equity (“PE”) beyond the transaction itself. Over thirty leading firms have partnered with the course, with a renewal rate of over 90 percent requested.

In addition to the projects, a highly popular slate of PE professionals offers full-class lectures on a variety of PE topics, including Deal Sourcing, Portfolio Operations, Capital Formation, PE CEOs, First-Time Funds, Career Management, Recent Alumni Retrospectives, “Getting Paid”, and First-Time Funds. The professor is very direct with the guests to maximize students' learning.

Professor Dionne also provides a popular “Random Musings” report from his role as Blackstone Senior Advisor, focusing on the PE fund formation business, and serves as director of numerous companies.

Career Focus

This course is for students looking for a role as an investor, portfolio operations or fundraising professional in alternative investments, as well as those looking to simply understand private equity better.

Educational Objectives

Through project work, students can “practice private equity” in a setting as close to authentic as possible. Projects will entail many aspects of private equity, and students will work directly with private equity firms and/or their portfolio companies. A final presentation is made to the private equity firm. Project work is designed to be of “mutual value” to students and the PE partner firm. Upon PE firm review, students are permitted to list the projects and the firm on their resumes.

Course Content and Organization

[Details of course modules; outline of what will be covered in each module / class day.]

Grading / Course Administration

Standard forced curve – student grade determined by faculty and project sponsors

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Course Overview Video

Course Overview

This course represents a unique opportunity for students to apply the skills learned in the classroom to a real-world public-market investment setting. Students will partner with an investment firm to work directly and deeply on an investment theme or question. In conjunction with their sponsor, students will develop a process and plan and execute it during the 14-week semester.

Dynamic weekly seminars supplement the project work and allow the class to come together to engage with industry leaders, protagonists, and asset allocators.

Students will learn first-hand the challenges and issues surrounding the diligence of an investment idea, the sourcing of opportunities, implementation, and portfolio and risk management. Students will develop and refine their investment process organization, creating a framework for investing. This should allow them to better utilize and develop pattern recognition and allow them to ponder: What is this firm's edge? How do they add alpha? How is the investment industry changing? Is the industry in a crisis?

This experience will not only help students shape their skills as investors-- modeling, pitching, participating on an investment committee--but also continue to build perspective on the eco-system of investment management.

Career Focus

Seminar in Investing is designed for the following types of students:

1. Those who will go into investment management.
2. Those who will aim to work or led a public company and want the lens of an investor into their company.
3. Those who want to peel back and better understand the eco-system of investment management at an individual investment and an investment firm level.

Learning Objectives

• Pattern recognition: Refine and develop a framework for investing
• Investment process organization: expose students to the investment process beyond research, from sourcing to implementation
• Develop more robust modeling and pitching skills
• Participate in an investment committee setting
• Work and develop relationships with incredible investors

Course Content

Field-Based Work: Teams of three will work with an investment firm on a specific investment theme or question; students will be allowed to rank top choices from a curated list of projects. Students will meet with their sponsor at least three times during the semester-- an introductory meeting, an in-person, and a final presentation. Students are expected to check in weekly with their sponsor. A final presentation will be given to their sponsors-- presented in front of the investment committee and senior management team. Students are expected to use their time with sponsors to think through and develop a research process and to better understand other issues surrounding an investment such as legal, trading and risk management. Students should also spend time shadowing other functions within the firm to better grasp the investment process.

The majority of the work on the projects will be done independently by the students using the resources at HBS and from the sponsoring firms. Students must be proactive and motivated; sponsors are giving their time for these projects and students must respect this commitment and deliver a strong product.

Classroom Setting: In addition to the project work, we will meet weekly over the course of the semester. Classroom time will be used for a mix of skill building, guests and time to come together to share challenges, learn from each other and seek feedback across teams. Interactive guest lectures will provide focus on building skills in the investment process from data sourcing and research to risk management and operations to asset allocation. The content of these sessions will help support project work and a deeper understanding of eco-system of investment management. Students will be expected to present once during the semester. There will be a presentation mid-way through the semester to update the class on the project and their firm. Presentations will simulate an investment committee, allowing peers to actively participate in an investment committee-like setting. Teams will be expected to have regular meetings with faculty.

Course Requirements and Grading

In addition to attending all the classroom discussions, students are expected to spend 3-5 hours a week working on their projects. Students will present once over the semester to their peers and give one final presentation to the investment committee of their sponsoring firm.

Students will be asked to submit their final presentation. These materials in combination with classroom participation will determine a student's grade.

Copyright © 2025 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Career Focus

Startup Operations is designed for three types of students:

1. Those who have already launched or are about to launch a startup. See the course FAQ for more details about company stage expectations.
2. Those who are curious about working for early-stage startups or know they want to found a venture but don't have an idea yet.
3. Those who are interested in investing in startups.

There is no specific industry focus for this course - all sectors and business models apply - including CPG, social enterprise, nonprofits and bootstrapped businesses.

This field course complements concepts covered in Launching Tech Ventures, Entrepreneurial Sales and Marketing, and Founders Mindset.

Educational Objectives

This course is designed to provide hands-on guidance through the early stages of building your business. Students will test assumptions and hypotheses to evolve their product, build their strategic and operating roadmaps, create organizational plans and develop skills necessary to manage the many complexities of operating a startup. Sessions will feature skill-building exercises led by the instructor and outside experts as well as weekly peer-to-peer critiques on work-in-progress. Students are encouraged to work as a cohort to support each other through their networks and to offer insights based on their own experiences.

Course Content

Through a series of class exercises and intimate conversations with experienced startup leaders, students examine operational challenges in early-stage startups. Enrolled students’ ventures are “live” cases in the course; thus each student will not only learn through the startup they are working on, but through the 19 other startups in the course. Taking the perspective that there is more to just “build it and they will come”, the course will explore four modules:

1. Getting To Product Market Fit: Exploring best practices for customer feedback, solution iteration, metrics that matter and developing a product and operations roadmap.
2. Establishing The Startup Organization: Structuring early teams and the processes by which to operate your business. Topics will include: Who to hire and when - from technical hires and managing freelancers/first hires to product managers, operations, support and other key team members. Cross-functional communication from across and between the organization to external communication with customers, partners and investors - and role shifting as the organization scales.
3. Startup Business Operations: We will explore legal matters, budgets, contracts and early go-to-market strategies such as pricing and product marketing. We will also discuss the why/when/hows of raising venture capital.
4. Startup Evolution: As companies grow and scale, operations and products will evolve. We will explore when and how to pivot, shift and adapt to these changes as your companies evolve.

The course is highly focused on ensuring each team’s business evolves towards success criteria unique to their product and organization. Therefore, each team will build a Goals & Milestones plan as their first deliverable. The work to achieve these milestones will be a large percentage of the course grade. Session participation, including weekly peer-to-peer critiques, routine session deliverables, and a final reflection will make up the remaining elements of the individual grade. Light weekly readings, podcasts, and films will be required in prep for each session. All readings and deliverables are designed to move student companies forward.

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Overview:

VCSME is a field course focused on operating and creating value in small and medium firms. Most of the sessions and lessons are taught through the lens of Entrepreneurship through Acquistion (EtA), but the lessons learned can be applied to many career paths and jobs. While not a prerequisite, many students who take VCSME have taken Financial Management of Small Firms (FMFS) in the fall semester. Students often take VCSME together with the field course Entrepreneurship through Acquisition (EtA).

Career Focus:

This course is geared towards students interested in Entrepreneurship through Acquisition including Search Funds, Self Funded search, and other EtA models. While the course is taught through the lens of EtA, the operating, leadership, and value creation lessons can be applied to many different career paths in management and investing.

Educational Objectives:

The educational objectives are to experience practical and theoretical models of value creation in small and medium firms. While small firms differ in industry, size, and complexity, there are many common themes that entrepreneurs focus on to drive value creation. Class sessions include a combination of vignette (mini-case) discussions, class exercises, role playing, and heavy guest participation. The course concept is to “bring the field to the students”.

Course Content and Organization:

Selected course sessions:
1. First day speech role play and early actions post acquisition
2. Financial systems, accounting, and metrics
3. Difficult conversations: Demotion, termination, star performer feedback
4. Hiring, recruiting talent to small firms, leading “A” players
5. Sales and building sales organizations in small firms
6. Growth through acquisition
7. CEO prioritization and Culture
8. Capital allocation
9. Selling your company and life post exit

Grading / Course Administration:

Grading is 50% based on class participation, 25% of pre-class assignments, and 25% final project (individual or teams of two).

Overview:

Taught by practitioner Jeff Bussgang (Flybridge co-founder and general partner), Field Course: Venture Capital Journey (VCJ) is designed for a small cohort of EC students who are serious about pursuing a career in venture capital.

Note that one of the goals of the course is to expand access and inclusion to the field of venture capital. Thus, the selection of students in the course will be intentionally diverse and include both students who came from the field as well as those who are keenly interested in the field, having had some exposure during their time at HBS through RC courses like TEM and Finance 101/102 as well as the EC course VCPE.

The focus of the course is to provide students with frameworks, tools, a network, and hands on experience in preparation for a career in venture capital (VC), ranging from seed to growth stage. The course will help students more deeply understand the conceptual underpinnings of venture capital investing and startup company financing. In so doing, we aspire to prepare students for a career in venture capital, with a particular focus on their personal and professional growth and fulfillment. Further, we will provide a “systems thinking” lens to the industry and prepare them to positive actors in the global VC / startup ecosystem as future investors and entrepreneurs.

Career Focus:

Most of our students will enter the course:

1. with previous VC experience as pre-MBA analysts, summer associates, or VC interns/scouts;
2. actively pursuing or already secured a VC job post-graduation; or
3. starting their own VC fund.

Educational Objectives:

In VCJ, students will learn all aspects of the venture capital process, including:

• Deal sourcing
• Developing an investment thesis
• Conducting due diligence
• Investment decision making
• Determining valuation and negotiating terms
• Constructing and managing a portfolio
• Board work
• Managing a firm

Further, students will have the opportunity to step back and learn about:

• Navigating a career in VC, including how to select a firm to join (with particular considerations to firm size, sector, geography, corporate vs. institutional), negotiate compensation, get promoted, and build a career and life in the industry.
• Brand building, community/content creation, and the opportunities and risks of leveraging various social media channels.
• The AI-native VC “tech stack” and relevant tools of the trade (e.g., Affinity, Carta, CB Insights, Pitchbook)
• Fundraising with high net worth and institutional Limited Partners (LPs) and how funds evolve over time.
• Recent innovations, including the role of incubators and accelerators, investor/operator funds, rolling funds, the globalization of the industry, and specific investment trends and innovation waves (e.g., web3/NFTs, blockchain, creator economy, tough tech, CRISPR and personalized medicine, health tech, fintech, investing in emerging markets).
• Ethical considerations, biases, and the racial/gender capital gap in the VC ecosystem

Course Content and Organization:

The course will consist of three components:

1. Classroom activities – classes will be a mix of case discussions, interactive workshops, and expert panel sessions.
2. Externship – students will work on externships at VC firms (typically sourcing deals, developing investment theses, and/or assisting with due diligence) or at an early-stage startup where their primary role will be to assist the startup in raising VC or – under the supervision of a VC mentor or faculty member – independent, self-guided thesis development focused on a particular sector.
3. Networking / Site Visits – students will meet in the field with VC partners and principals to get a sense of the different strategies that different firms employ as well as to build their individual networks, with a particular focus on deeper exposure to the Boston and NYC startup ecosystems (in person).

Grading / Course Administration:

• 30%: Class Engagement Quality
• 30%: Assignments and Exercises
• 20%: Final Essay: Model Innovations + Reflections
• 20%: Externship Feedback

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Career Focus

This course is suitable for anyone who is interested in owning, managing or investing in smaller businesses.

Educational Objectives

The course focuses on how to manage smaller businesses with an emphasis on the financial aspects of buying and growing these businesses. The cases are designed to give students practical knowledge that will be immediately helpful if they plan to own or manage a small business, provide consulting or financial services to these businesses, or invest in smaller businesses. These smaller businesses are privately owned, are typically led by a CEO/entrepreneur supported by a very small management team, produce a service or product for which a current profitable business model exists (as distinct from many VC-backed developmental businesses), and frequently the businesses are of a scale that they can be acquired and owned by individuals instead of institutions or families. The managerial and financial challenges for these firms are different from those of larger, public firms and often require a different approach because of their small scale, lack of liquidity and the difficulty of attracting and deploying capital. The careers of small business entrepreneurs are also very different from the employees of larger firms, and we explore those differences through numerous guests and a few cases that focus on the advantages and disadvantages of the career choice.

Click on this link to see comments of former HBS students who discuss why they chose a career in entrepreneurship through acquisition: https://courseware.hbs.edu/video/?v=0_cteitfd6

Course Content and Organization

The course first focuses on how to buy a small business. We begin with the case of two HBS MBAs who chose to purchase a small business using a search fund instead of pursuing a more traditional career path. The case tracks their search process and highlights the challenges encountered when acquiring a small business. We then learn about different ways to fund a search through five other acquisitions by HBS graduates. We then focus on the market for smaller firms including cases about private equity firms that operates in the small business market.

We then focus on how to successfully manage the financial aspects of smaller firms. We explore the difficulty of growing these firms and explore which business models are more likely to succeed. And, of course, we explore how these businesses finance themselves as they grow. These smaller firms, unlike bigger firms, often face tradeoffs between liquidity and profitability, and a common feature of successful firms seems to be a willingness to sacrifice profitability for liquidity. These tradeoffs are particularly relevant to acquisitions made by recent MBA graduates as they navigated through the Great Recession and COVID. We discuss four recent acquisitions that faced significant financial hurdles.

We study capital investment decisions made by smaller businesses, decisions that emphasize financial capacity and lifestyle choices instead of maximizing market value. We study alternative growth strategies including approaches to sales force management in the context of a smaller firm. We also learn about the special problems that confront smaller business such as customer concentration and conflicts between outside investors and managers.

We conclude the course with integrative cases that follow the experience of entrepreneurs as they search for a smaller company, acquire it and grow it successfully, and then confront the decision of when to sell the business so that they can realize the benefits of their entrepreneurial venture.

The course is a prerequisite for the EC field course, Entrepreneurship through Acquisition, which is offered in the spring term.

Course Content Keywords: Small business, ETA, corporate finance

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Course Description

Almost all human endeavors start with a Founder—a person who is willing to challenge the status quo, question prevailing wisdom on what is possible, and change our world. Founders notice problems and can see a potential solution that improves the lives of those around them. It’s an extraordinarily attractive proposition to so many, yet so few people are successful in accomplishing this goal.

A founder needs to make difficult decisions in the face of great uncertainty and massively imperfect information. How does one, often with relatively little experience, develop and exercise the judgement to make these decisions? This course will lead a discussion around The Founder Mindset and the characteristics that enables one to build businesses of significance and make a meaningful difference in the world.

Why Learn About The Founder Mindset?

The course examines the choices all founders make when starting and building a venture, and provides helpful frameworks and practical tips and tools for building, scaling, and eventually exiting the business. How do you assemble, motivate and lead a team when you have big ambitions, limited resources, and a compass instead of a map? The course will walk you through practical actions, such as selecting a team, choosing a business model, and what to consider when choosing a co-founder and writing a founders’ agreement. You’ll learn tactics for dealing with difficult situations, like firing an employee, pivoting your business model, or selling/closing the business. The course supplements case studies and discussions with simulations and role-plays, where you will be faced with challenging situations and forced to make difficult decisions. You will gain a sense of the intense pressures, difficult decisions, and extremes—highs and lows—that every founder confronts in some way.

We analyze certain pivotal choices made by over 20 founders who set out to change the world in small and big ways. We meet a Lebanese young woman who spent 10 years making the perfect swimming goggle, and we look at the journeys of people who want to save human civilization by moving to Mars or reversing climate change. We see the strange twists of fate that resulted in iconic companies like Tinder, Tesla, and Pandora. We will try to tease apart the business model and financing choices that contributed to the outcome. In most cases, the pivotal choices these founders made have their roots in “people decisions.” Yet most founders (and VCs) pay less attention to the "people" choices that are critical to success.

In this course, you will think about: How should teams be structured? How can a founder see his or her own blind spots? Can you augment a founder’s weaknesses by hiring a complimentary team? When should a CEO be replaced?

We observe how both successes and failures have common antecedents. We look at the journeys of people who have succeeded because of the way they handled their failures. We will discuss the importance of exercising judgment and making consequential decisions, all with imperfect information and insufficient resources. We will also explore the power of commitment. Despite different outcomes, each founder has made a difference that others can build on. And, by pushing their intellectual and emotional limits, founders usually emerge stronger and more resilient. The Founder Mindset is a course about this human journey to make a difference in the world.

Who Should Take This Course?

The course provides a strong conceptual foundation and practical tools for addressing common situations in entrepreneurship. In particular, this course should appeal to anyone interested in being a founder and creating something of significance. In addition, anyone interested in being involved with high-growth ventures, working with entrepreneurs as investors or advisors, working in entrepreneurial environments that are dynamic, complex and changing, or even just cultivating your own Founder Mindset can benefit from this course.

Course Structure

The course is structured into five modules that represent roughly five critical decisions that together form The Founder Mindset: Idea Generation & Commitment, Founding Team, Raising Money, Difficult Decisions, and Equity Value Creation. Each module addresses specific issues—such as choosing co-founders, negotiating equity, hiring, firing, working with your board, and building your team—that occur primarily in that stage.

• IDEA GENERATION & COMMITMENT focuses on early critical decisions a founder makes regarding idea selection and commitment. It examines the stress of maintaining outward positivity in the face of constant adversity and uncertainty, and how important it is to display commitment.
• FOUNDING TEAM explores the importance of hiring right, building a strong team, and establishing trust in your co-founder relationship.
• RAISING MONEY widens the perspective to consider how a founder should approach raising financing and how the organization should be structured so that it can deliver a product or service reliably.
• DIFFICULT DECISIONS addresses many of the perennial questions of entrepreneurship: “Should I persist, pivot, or perish (close the business)”? “How do I fire employees?” What does it mean to “fail well?”
• EQUITY VALUE CREATION addresses the cases where founders are challenged with the growth of their firms and the requirement to deliver financially, answering questions like where should the CEO focus, what metrics matter, are your actions value accretive or destructive, do you grow or exit, and is all value-creation monetary?

Course Requirements

Classes include case discussions, workshops, and team exercises that require your active participation. In addition to case discussions, you will be asked to deliver a pitch, conduct peer interviews, and reflect on your learning. There is no final exam, but instead a final project in which you will either deliver a comprehensive pitch or share how The Founder Mindset will help you achieve a greater impact.

Required Materials

You should come to class having already completed the assignment due for that day. That may entail reading cases or other required readings, watching videos, and/or participating in an activity. 

Copyright © 2024 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Few forces have shaped the world over the past millennium more than capitalism has, yet few terms remain more elusive and more divisive. Today, less than half of young Americans view capitalism positively, and calls for alternatives are becoming ever more frequent. Why? And why have different forms of capitalism led to such unequal outcomes around the world? What is capitalism, really; what has it been, and what might it be? This course takes students on a journey to explore the past, present, and future of various forms of capitalisms, globally and beyond, introducing them to theories and frameworks to help make sense of the world in which they live, and where it might be headed.

The world economy is experiencing a rare confluence of inflection points, and this course uses a variety of both country and company cases to give students a deeper understanding of why, how, and with what consequences economic life on the planet will change in their lifetimes, and the unique roles played by businesses in this process. In so doing, it challenges students to think critically about the future and how they might contribute to shaping a more equitable and sustainable economic system.

Overview:

Tech-enabled entrepreneurship drives economic development globally, as seen in Israel, India, Singapore, China, and Estonia. Yet little research guides founders and investors navigating these markets. This course develops strategies for founders and investors outside the United States through examining how tech-enabled startups exploit opportunity in different country contexts. The course will examine startups and venture capital firms in 26 different countries.

Career Focus:

This course serves students exploring careers as founders, joiners or venture capitalists in startup ecosystems outside the United States, providing frameworks to adapt strategies to local contexts. Those pursuing ventures in developed markets gain insights into factors influencing success and failure, particularly for market expansion. Aspiring global VC investors learn to evaluate sustainable start-up markets. Students interested in economic and business environments generally will understand how various levers aid or hinder development through entrepreneurship's lens.

Educational Objectives:

The course provides critical knowledge and frameworks for founders and investors navigating startups in emerging ecosystems globally, offering institutional understanding and strategic tools for decision-making.

Course Content and Organization:

Module 1: Industry Structure & Macroeconomy

Examines how industry structures and macroeconomic factors shape tech-enabled startup opportunities: digitization/modernization (fintech, supply chain, agriculture), imitation of successful models with local adaptation, deep tech ventures leveraging specialized talent, and managing volatile macroeconomic conditions including investment retrenchment, inflation, and currency devaluation.

Module 2: Talent Acquisition

Explores talent availability challenges and strategies for identifying technical and business talent in different country contexts, addressing specialization shortages, cultural nuances, and cross-cultural communication.

Module 3: Financing Sources

Analyzes funding opportunities and challenges for both VC and angel investors in these markets. Explores alternative funding for startups including crowdfunding, impact investing, government programs, and strategies for navigating alternative financing models in capital-constrained environments.

Module 4: Legal & Regulatory Environments

Addresses importance of regulatory frameworks, bureaucracy, corruption, securities laws, bankruptcy regulations, and taxation that impact startups differently across markets.

Module 5: Cultural Differences

Examines how cultural attitudes toward failure, risk, creativity, and entrepreneurship affect startup market vibrancy and startup success across different countries, with strategies for entrepreneurs and investors to navigate these differences.

Module 6: Exit Strategies

Analyzes the critical challenge of exit availability for founders and investors and how essential these various exit opportunities are for sustainable VC fund cycles and continued capital raising.

Grading / Course Administration:

The grading for the course will be 50% class participation and 50% final exam.

Course Content Keywords: Tech-enabled startup, venture capital


Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Career Focus

Globalization and Emerging Markets is designed for students who will be investing, managing a business or nonprofit, or working for a government in an emerging or frontier market, as well as for those who wish to acquire a richer conceptual understanding of the nature of capitalism, globalization, and economic development worldwide. The unit of analysis of the course ranges from the international system as a whole through individual countries, alone and in comparative perspective, to multinational and domestic companies operating in emerging markets. Students are asked to adopt the perspective of different decision-makers, such as policymakers, technocrats, investors, and managers. For instance, students may have to take the perspective of a new private oil and gas company in Kurdistan, an entrenched domestic conglomerate in the Philippines, a muckraking foreign-run hedge fund in Russia, or the de facto leader of Myanmar as economic sanctions are lifted but a genocide is ongoing. Most cases are set beyond the so-called BRICs of Brazil, Russia, India, and China, in today’s “frontier” markets that are only beginning to attract the attention of mainstream investors, and some are purposefully historical in order to give insight into the evolution of the world economy and the strategies once pursued by states and companies in currently developed countries when they first emerged. The course should, in short, appeal to anyone considering spending part of their career working, investing, or thinking outside of the major developed markets.

Educational Objectives

The majority of economic growth is now occurring in countries that are not historically wealthy high-income democracies, and where many of the textbook assumptions regarding how markets function—such as the enforcement of contracts, anti-trust laws, universally low or absent tariffs, governments acting as referees rather than players—often do not hold. These trends and characteristics provide a unique set of opportunities for entrepreneurs and investors in the developed world and within emerging markets themselves, as well as for policymakers and stakeholders searching for paths to development. But they also introduce significant risk for those doing business in the developing world. GEM provides frameworks to understand the processes of economic growth and development; to develop contextual intelligence regarding emerging markets; to manage within a weaker or less formalized institutional environment; and to think globally and dynamically about capitalism.

Course Organization

GEM consists of three interrelated modules. First, we consider the process of economic growth and development, and, in so doing, develop the ability to analyze an emerging market at the level of the country. Second, we engage with entrepreneurs in frontier markets who must understand this macro view in order to make cross-industry investment decisions as well as navigate the unique contexts of emerging market. The final module examines the bilateral exchange of power, progress, and dispossession between developed and developing parts of the global economy. The course uses a variety of country and company cases from more than 20 emerging and frontier markets to accomplish these objectives. The cases range from country cases on some of the fastest-growing economies in the world to cases on mining, gas, banking, infrastructure, retail, technology, tourism, and hedge fund companies operating in emerging markets.

Other EC courses that complement this course:

MITI, IMaGE, and BBOP.

Course Keywords:

global, development, frontier markets, emerging markets, social mission, ethics, international

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Course Description to come.

Course description to come.

Fall On-Campus Course Sessions: Thursdays, 3:10 – 5:10pm: September 10, September 17 September 24, October 1, October 15, October 22, November 5, November 12, November 19, December 3. Note: several of these dates are blocked for scheduled team-work time.
January: Dates Arrival in Shanghai, China on January 3, 2027, Departure on January 15, 2027.
Course Fee: $3,300 (see note on financial aid)

Immersive Field Courses: IFCs require a firm commitment and carry a financial obligation. Financial aid is available in the form of a student loan, a need-based HBS scholarship, or a combination of both depending on your individual circumstances. The Add/Drop process at the start of the term is the mechanism for any IFC enrollment changes, and, after that point, the course fee is non-refundable. Refer to the GEO website for full details on IFCs and be sure you understand the Course Policies and Course Fee & Financial Aid. Visit IFC Financial Aid for a quick assessment to determine your eligibility and process or contact finaid@hbs.edu for more information.

Enrollment: Limited to 45 MBA students (due to the nature of IFCs, auditing is not permitted). Students must be able to obtain a visa to visit China.

Career Focus

The course will expose participants to the economic and business environment in China, offering an in-depth exploration of the country’s transformation in manufacturing, technology, and trade. The course is specifically designed to help students understand China’s role in the global economy not through a geopolitical lens alone, but as a managerial, strategic, and domestic political phenomenon. We will examine how Chinese firms compete differently, how industrial policy and ecosystem coordination reshape global cost curves, and what China’s shift toward technological self-reliance means for multinationals operating there and for firms competing with Chinese companies around the world.

How do Chinese firms compete at the global frontier? What happens to supply chains when scale, policy, and ecosystem coordination align? How are multinationals reassessing their China strategies as the structure of interdependence is rewritten?

The course will address these questions through a combination of case discussions, readings, and immersive site visits. Through interactions with Chinese firms, multinational companies, and production and logistics facilities, students will gain firsthand insight into China’s innovation ecosystems and supply chain architecture. Our visits will span a range of sectors and will include perspectives from both established industrial players and fast-moving technology companies.

Educational Objectives

Through immersing students in China’s industrial and technological landscape and examining the state-business relationships and policy frameworks that underpin it, exploration and learning will center on a few key questions:

• China’s Industrial Transformation – How has China moved from low-cost assembly to frontier positions in electric vehicles, advanced batteries, solar photovoltaics, telecommunications, shipbuilding, and increasingly biopharmaceuticals and AI-enabled systems?
• China’s industrial policy has attempted to build domestic innovation capacity while maintaining global commercial reach. How has this worked in practice, and what are the implications for firms that compete or partner with Chinese companies?
• What is the role of geography and regional variation in China’s development? How do regional clusters illustrate distinct models of industrial policy and ecosystem coordination?
• As global supply chains regionalize and firms reassess their exposure, how are multinationals navigating the choice between geographic diversification and deeper localization within China? What are the strategic trade-offs?
• What is China’s medium- and long-term trajectory in technology, trade, and geopolitics, and what are the implications for global managers?
• How do students assess the competitive dynamics between Chinese and Western firms across sectors, and how should global managers think about the risks and opportunities that arise?
• What are the likely advantages and challenges that will emerge as China continues to reorient its economy around domestic consumption, technological self-reliance, and selective global engagement?
• For the individual companies and facilities we visit throughout the course, how do China’s policies and ecosystem attributes help or constrain their competitive strategies?

Course Content and Model

Overview and Introduction: In the Fall semester, we will hold approximately six sessions to provide students with a foundational understanding of China’s economic and industrial transformation, framed around manufacturing competitiveness, supply chain architecture, state-business relations, and the geopolitics of technology. These sessions will combine case discussions and readings with guest perspectives from practitioners and scholars. The Fall classes will cover (preliminary): China’s development model and industrial policy; the political economy of state-business relations; China’s role in global supply chains; key sectors including electric vehicles, batteries, solar, biopharmaceuticals, and AI; and the strategic choices facing multinationals operating in or competing with China.

The January segment of the course will start and end in Shanghai, and we will use this as a base for visits across the Yangtze delta and Hangzhou Bay/Zhejiang Province area to the south and Anhui Province to the west. Throughout the immersion, students will attend visits across a broad range of production, logistics, and government sites, and will engage with Chinese firms, multinational companies operating in China, and industry experts.

Deliverables: Student teams will undertake a project consisting of a paper and presentation on a subject selected from a list provided by the instructors. Teams will present their preliminary presentations during Fall class sessions so that the entire class will have a solid background on the subject prior to the January travel segment. Draft papers will be due prior to departure, and a final version will be due after the completion of the immersion. Final grades will consider: (i) participation and attendance during the class sessions in the Fall semester, as well as in China; (ii) engagement with site visit partners; (iii) on-site activities; (iv) feedback from organizations; and (v) the final team paper and presentation.

Site Visits: Students will have the opportunity to visit manufacturing facilities, technology companies, logistics hubs, and government institutions, as well as various cultural sites. Students will come to appreciate the scale, dynamism, and complexity of China’s operating environment firsthand.

Course Credit and Fees

Students will receive 3 credits upon successful completion of this course.

HBS will provide logistical support for the immersion (including accommodations, select meals, and local travel arrangements). Students will be charged a course fee towards defraying a portion of these costs. Students are responsible for booking and paying for their own round-trip air travel and any costs associated with required visa documentation and immunizations. Students should ensure adequate processing time for all visas, as travel fees are not refundable if a student does not secure visas on time.

For detailed information about what the course program fee includes and excludes, as well as information about student accommodations, please visit the GEO website or email geo@hbs.edu.

GEO continuously evaluates the safety and logistical feasibility of running Immersive Field Courses in each location. Please be aware that IFCs can be canceled at any time due to changes in global health and safety or other unforeseen circumstances. Students will not be redistributed into another IFC, nor will a new course be developed. Course fees will be refunded.

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Fall On-Campus Course Sessions: Thursday sessions (4 sessions): 3:10 – 5:10pm on September 24, October 15, November 12, and November 19

Travel Dates: Arrive: Tuesday, January 5 and depart on Friday, January 15, 2027. (Hyderabad and Mumbai)
Course Fee: $3,100 (see note on financial aid)

Immersive Field Courses: IFCs require a firm commitment and carry a financial obligation. Financial aid is available in the form of a student loan, a need-based HBS scholarship, or a combination of both depending on your individual circumstances. The Add/Drop process at the start of the term is the mechanism for any IFC enrollment changes, and, after that point, the course fee is non-refundable. Refer to the GEO website for full details on IFCs and be sure you understand the Course Policies and Course Fee & Financial Aid. Visit IFC Financial Aid for a quick assessment to determine your eligibility and process or contact finaid@hbs.edu for more information.

Enrollment: Limited to 45 MBA students (due to the nature of IFCs, auditing is not permitted)

Course Overview

The global race to eliminate greenhouse gases from the atmosphere has started in full earnest. The stakes are high: emissions released by human activities are taking a catastrophic toll on the planet, prompting a potentially irreversible climate crisis. At the same time, developing economies like India must sustain rapid growth — expanding energy systems, building industrial capacity, and incorporating technology including AI – to increase per capita income. Balancing these priorities defines one of the central challenges of development at scale.

IFC India presents an opportunity for students to advance their knowledge of sustainability efforts while examining how large-scale development unfolds in practice. The course will address and unpack the role of energy systems, industrial transformation, and AI-enabled solutions in building a sustainable future. Students will explore how to balance development and sustainability at scale, including maintaining basic development goals — improving infrastructure, reducing poverty, energy access, housing, transport services, water, food security, education, and healthcare — while prioritizing decarbonization and per capita income. This course will also examine how AI and digital technologies can improve efficiency, optimize energy and industrial systems, and support development at scale, while integrating learning across BGIE, finance, general management, technology, LCA, CAP and more!

This is a research-based course consisting of case and research-based learning in Boston and field research in India. Students will work in teams of 4-5, focused on a particular research work stream. Potential work streams include energy generation (renewables, cleaner fossil fuels, decentralized solutions, and biomass), mobility, clean-tech, agriculture, urban resilience and adaptation, hard to abate sectors (steel, cement), carbon sequestering, and waste management. Students will be able to select which research work stream they work on and form their own team.

In Fall 2026, students will address the opportunities and challenges presented by these work streams during four class sessions. These sessions will include cases, guests, and collaborative student assignments. In January 2027, students will visit 10-12 organizations (including their operating facilities) in Hyderabad and Mumbai. These organizations could include private companies and government entities such as the Mumbai Municipal Corporation, Tata Power, JSW Steel, and Unilever, and startups such as Greenko, CtrlS, Cygni Energy and 4PEL. We will also focus on rural development and energy access for the poor arranged through organizations such as the SELCO Foundation. The schedule during the Immersion is expected to be intense with quite a bit of road travel so please be prepared for that.

I have been doing business in India for over 35years. This course will leverage my knowledge of the country and my network with business, government, non-profits, and development agencies to deliver a unique experience for students who not only want to learn more about, energy systems, technology-based development and climate related issues but also want to get a general understanding of doing business in India.

The final product is for each student team to produce a research paper on their work stream based on their research in Boston and the site visits in India.

Course Credit and Fees

Students will receive 3 credits upon successful completion of this course.

HBS will provide logistical support for the immersion (including accommodations, select meals, and local travel arrangements). Students will be charged a course fee towards defraying a portion of these costs. Students are responsible for booking and paying for their own round-trip air travel and any costs associated with required visa documentation and immunizations. Students should ensure adequate processing time for all visas, as travel fees are not refundable if a student does not secure visas on time.

For detailed information about what the course program fee includes and excludes, as well as information about student accommodations, please visit the GEO website or email geo@hbs.edu.

GEO continuously evaluates the safety and logistical feasibility of running Immersive Field Courses in each location. Please be aware that IFCs can be canceled at any time due to changes in global health and safety or other unforeseen circumstances. Students will not be redistributed into another IFC, nor will a new course be developed. Course fees will be refunded.

Course description to come.

Fall On-Campus Course Sessions (4 sessions): Thursdays at 3:10 – 5:10pm: September 17, October 15, November 12, and November 19.
January: Arrive Monday, January 4 and Depart Friday, January 15
Course Fee: $3,800 (see note on Financial Aid)

Immersive Field Courses: IFCs require a firm commitment and carry a financial obligation. Financial aid is available in the form of a student loan, a need-based HBS scholarship, or a combination of both depending on your individual circumstances. The Add/Drop process at the start of the term is the mechanism for any IFC enrollment changes, and, after that point, the course fee is non-refundable. Refer to the GEO website for full details on IFCs and be sure you understand the Course Policies and Course Fee & Financial Aid. Visit IFC Financial Aid for a quick assessment to determine your eligibility and process or contact finaid@hbs.edu for more information.

Enrollment: Limited to 45 MBA students (due to the nature of IFCs, auditing is not permitted)

Career Focus

This course will expose students to Japan as a nurturing ground for both developing as well as enhancing the uptake of innovative products, services, and business strategies. This course will appeal to students who wish to acquire an understanding of alternative leadership styles and business models aimed at simultaneously creating economic and societal value. Through project work with a diverse range of business partners, from established corporations to burgeoning startups, students will have an opportunity to gain practical insights into Japan’s unique business ecosystem. This hands-on experience is invaluable for students aspiring to become leaders adept at navigating and leveraging diverse business landscapes for societal and economic benefit.

Educational Objectives

From cutting-edge robotics to technological art, from big data to nano-devices, Japan has become a hub for innovative projects that, despite their seemingly unconventional nature, have achieved considerable success.

This course will expose students to a diverse range of pioneering organizations and business models, with the aim of achieving three primary learning objectives. First, the course provides students with firsthand experiences and insights into the distinctive challenges and opportunities of conducting business and introducing innovation in Japan. Secondly, students will be exposed to how innovation can emerge and diffuse by combining novel business models and marketing strategies for both economic as well as societal benefit. Finally, the course will expose students to Japanese culture and traditions, allowing them to gain a deeper appreciation of a unique society.

Course Content and Model

Overview and Introduction: Students enrolled in the Immersive Field Course: Japan will work in small teams to undertake a project with an organization based in the Tokyo area. The course will meet for four on-campus sessions to (1) provide students with a basic understanding of the Japanese innovation ecosystem, (2) highlight some of the challenges and opportunities faced by businesses trying to bring innovation to market in Japan, (3) discuss how some emerging business models and marketing strategies lend themselves to new forms of organizing, and (4) allow time for student teams to work together, engage with their project partners to define and scope the projects that will take place in January, and to prepare for travel.

Projects: By the start of the course, project partners will have submitted a brief description of the business problem they would like students to address during the immersion. Before the second on-campus session, student teams will be formed. We will do our best to allocate students to their preferred project partners.

In the period from October to their arrival in Japan, student teams will engage in conversations and early work with project partners (scope the project, request/receive additional information, conduct telephone or Zoom interviews, develop early hypotheses, develop a work plan, etc.) in preparation for the field work that will take place in Japan.

While in Japan, student teams will visit and work closely with their project partners in Tokyo. Students will have the opportunity to assess the market/organizational environment by talking to customers, suppliers, government officials, and related organizations, as needed. Project teams will develop a set of recommendations before the last day of the immersion.

Deliverables: Students are expected to engage professionally and thoughtfully with their project partners in Japan. Student teams will present their recommendations to the project partners. In addition, each student will present their personal take-aways at a Capstone event. Final grades will consider: (i) participation and attendance during the four class sessions in the Fall semester, as well as in Japan; (ii) engagement with project partners; (iii) on-site activities in Tokyo and Tohoku; (iv) feedback from partner organizations and peers on project work; and (v) a final report.

Tours: Students will have the opportunity to take part in company visits as well as various cultural activities throughout their stay in Japan. Students will come to appreciate unique business protocols practiced in Japanese companies - e.g., exchange of name cards, silence in elevators, empathy to co-workers, punctuality, etc. - that contribute to Japan’s unique approach to innovation and entrepreneurship.

Accommodations and Activities: Students will experience two different types of accommodations. In Tokyo, where the majority of overnights will take place, students will stay at a modern hotel in Central Tokyo. Students will have the opportunity to take the bullet-train (Shinkansen) and stay at a traditional Japanese ryokan. They will soak in hot spring baths (Onsen) and eat dinner wearing a yukata. Students will also have opportunities for other cultural activities in Tokyo, such as visiting live practice of sumo wrestlers.

Course Credit and Fees

Students will receive 3 credits upon successful completion of this course.

HBS will provide logistical support for the immersion (including accommodations, select meals, and local travel arrangements). Students will be charged a course fee towards defraying a portion of these costs. Students are responsible for booking and paying for their own round-trip air travel and any costs associated with required visa documentation and immunizations. Students should ensure adequate processing time for all visas, as travel fees are not refundable if a student does not secure visas on time.

For detailed information about what the course program fee includes and excludes, as well as information about student accommodations, please visit the GEO website or email geo@hbs.edu.

Fall On-Campus Course Sessions: (5 sessions) Thursdays 3:10 – 5:10 pm: September 17, October 15, November 5, November 19, December 3
Travel Dates: Arrival on Monday, January 4, 2027. Departure on Wednesday, January 13, 2027.
Course Fee: $3,500 (see note on financial aid)

Immersive Field Courses: IFCs require a firm commitment and carry a financial obligation. Financial aid is available in the form of a student loan, a need-based HBS scholarship, or a combination of both depending on your individual circumstances. The Add/Drop process at the start of the term is the mechanism for any IFC enrollment changes, and, after that point, the course fee is non-refundable. Refer to the GEO website for full details on IFCs and be sure you understand the Course Policies and Course Fee & Financial Aid. Visit IFC Financial Aid for a quick assessment to determine your eligibility and process or contact finaid@hbs.edu for more information.

Enrollment: Limited to 45 MBA students (due to the nature of IFCs, auditing is not permitted)

Educational Objectives:

Saudi Arabia, the largest economy in the Middle East, is implementing its hugely ambitious Vision 2030 initiative, which aims to transform the nation and diversify its economy away from oil dependency. This transition entails massive change for the country, along multiple dimensions. The nation has also elevated its prominence on the global stage. While Saudi Arabia has tended to be seen through a set of limited lenses in the West, like any other society it is multifaceted and should be understood through diverse lenses.

Over the past few years, the country has poured enormous resources towards diversifying sources of economic growth away from petrochemicals. Societal change has been rapid in some dimensions – exhilarating and sometimes disconcerting – and on others has been glacially slow. This has triggered new entrepreneurial opportunities as well as identified some vulnerabilities for entrepreneurs, incumbent enterprises, and financiers. Emerging sectors such as tourism, media, hospitality, entertainment, mining, metals, finance, and digital technologies, including fintech, AI, and clean energy, are gaining prominence, and this diversification opens doors for innovation and investment.

On the heels of a recent, unexpected development—the war in Iran and its reverberations--the Kingdom will have to navigate its continuing transformation in a still more challenging environment.

This Immersive Field Course presents a unique opportunity for students to explore first-hand the breadth, and the nuances, of Saudi Arabia's transformation. Through discussions, on-site visits, and interactions with alumni, companies and business leaders, and government officials, students will gain perspective on the Kingdom's trajectory, opportunities and challenges.

Course Focus and Format:

Five sessions will be held on campus in the fall. These sessions—which will include case discussions, non-case readings, guest speakers and panel discussions—will help prepare students for their in-country experiences. These sessions will explore the business and economic setting, along with aspects of the social and geopolitical context. They will also introduce students to frameworks for better understanding the broader institutional context they will encounter. Students will grapple with the extent to which lessons from their RC courses can either transfer over to the Gulf context or need to be adapted. Professor Khanna’s work on Contextual Intelligence will be a central part of these discussions.

While students’ learning during the Saudi Arabia Immersion will be broad by design, they will also be organized into teams of 5-6 students, with each team focusing part of its learning (and ultimately writing a report) on a particular agreed theme.

Students will be in Riyadh for most of the Immersion, but will also travel as a cohort--to either Dammam (headquarters of Saudi Aramco) or Jeddah (on the Red Sea coast)--to continue to explore course themes.

Course Faculty:

Professor Tarun Khanna

My work for three decades at HBS and Harvard has been purely about economic development in emerging markets, typically through an entrepreneurial lens. An article I wrote in HBR in 2014, “Contextual Intelligence,” is used as part of the preparation for RC students in FGI, and I expect will be one of the conceptual anchors for this IFC. Similarly, frameworks that I have developed for competing in emerging markets, some with Krishna Palepu and then with dozens of PhD students over the years will be used in the Fall preparatory sessions for this IFC.

Senior Lecturer Andy Zelleke

This iteration of the Saudi IFC will be the third on which Prof. Khanna and I will have collaborated. I have also previously led nine FIELD CAP Immersion cohorts, including two most recently in the MENA region (Egypt). I presently serve as the Faculty Chair of the HBS Middle East, North Africa & Central Asia Research Center.

Grading:

Grades will be based on attendance and participation during the course sessions in the Fall; active engagement throughout the Saudi Arabia Immersion, which will conclude with each team presenting to the full cohort; a team final written report; and a short individual reflection paper.

Course Credit and Fees:

Students will receive 3 credits upon successful completion of this course.

HBS will provide logistical support for the immersion (including hotel accommodations, select meals, and local travel arrangements). Students will be charged a course fee to help defray a portion of these costs. Students are responsible for booking and paying for their own round-trip air travel and any costs associated with required visa documentation and immunizations. Students should ensure adequate processing time for all visas, as travel fees are not refundable if a student does not secure visas on time.

For detailed information about what the course program fee includes and excludes, as well as information about student accommodations, please visit the GEO website or email geo@hbs.edu.

GEO continuously evaluates the safety and logistical feasibility of running Immersive Field Courses in each location. Please be aware that IFCs can be canceled at any time due to changes in global health and safety or other unforeseen circumstances. Students will not be redistributed into another IFC, nor will a new course be developed. Course fees will be refunded.

Fall On-Campus Course Sessions: Thursdays 3:10 – 5:10pm: September 10, September 17*, October 15*, November 19*, December 3**

January Immersion Dates: Arrive Sunday, January 17 and depart Saturday, January 23

Course Fee: $1,900 (see note on Financial Aid)

Immersive Field Courses: IFCs require a firm commitment and carry a financial obligation. Financial aid is available in the form of a student loan, a need-based HBS scholarship, or a combination of both depending on your individual circumstances. The Add/Drop process at the start of the term is the mechanism for any IFC enrollment changes, and, after that point, the course fee is non-refundable. Refer to the GEO website for full details on IFCs and be sure you understand the Course Policies and Course Fee & Financial Aid. Visit IFC Financial Aid for a quick assessment to determine your eligibility and process or contact finaid@hbs.edu for more information.

Enrollment: Limited to 45 MBA students (due to the nature of IFCs, auditing is not permitted)

Twenty-five years ago, the Internet changed the landscape of the tech sector. Nearly every category incumbent across B2B and B2C was disrupted by Internet-first startups that dominate today’s “most valuable companies” list. Will history repeat itself as we enter the age of AI? Will a new cohort of native AI startups reshape the tech sector? Or will the incumbents maintain their leadership positions?

In this course, “Disrupting Silicon Valley with Artificial Intelligence”, we will explore these questions. During the Fall, students will be assembled into small teams to analyze a specific B2B or B2C category, focusing on incumbents’ positions and opportunities for startup disruption.

We will conclude the research phase of the course in early January and travel to Silicon Valley to present our findings and meet with AI thought leaders in the region. Past guests include:

• Jay Puri (COO, NVIDIA)
• Tekedra Mawakana (CEO, Waymo)
• Dmitry Shevelenko (CBO, Perplexity)
• Pat Grady (Managing Director at Sequoia)
• Aliisa Rosenthal (Head of Sales at OpenAI)
• Dylan Field (Founder/CEO, Figma)
• Drew Houston (Founder/CEO of Dropbox)
• Yamini Rangan (CEO, HubSpot)
• Ryan Roslansky (CEO, LinkedIn)
• Shishir Mehrotra (CEO of Grammarly/Superhuman)
• Scott Belsky (CSO, Adobe)
• Frederick Kerrest (co-founder of Okta)
• Sid Sidbrandij (Founder, CEO of GitLab)

Course credit and fees

Students will receive 3 credits upon successful completion of this course.

HBS will provide logistical support for the immersion (including accommodations, select meals, and local travel arrangements). Students will be charged a course fee of GEO will input fee towards defraying a portion of these costs. Students are responsible for booking and paying for their own round-trip air travel and any costs associated with required visa documentation and immunizations. Students should ensure adequate processing time for all visas, as travel fees are not refundable if a student does not secure visas on time.

For detailed information about what the course program fee includes and excludes, as well as information about student accommodations, please visit the GEO website or email geo@hbs.edu.

GEO continuously evaluates the safety and logistical feasibility of running Immersive Field Courses in each location. Please be aware that IFCs can be canceled at any time due to changes in global health and safety or other unforeseen circumstances. Students will not be redistributed into another IFC, nor will a new course be developed. Course fees will be refunded.

*Outside of the opening class session on 9/10, we will not meet as a class on the remaining dates. Instead, we will schedule 30-minute 1-on-team reviews between Professor Roberge and the project team during the class timeframe.

**Note: Students can enroll in this IFC and Professor Roberge’s Entrepreneurial Sales 101 course. The course meeting times do not conflict.

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Fall On-Campus Course Sessions: Thursdays at 3:10 – 5:10pm: dates TBD

January: Arrival: Sunday, January 3, Departure: Monday, January 11
Course Fee: $3,600 (see note on financial aid)

Immersive Field Courses: IFCs require a firm commitment and carry a financial obligation. Financial aid is available in the form of a student loan, a need-based HBS scholarship, or a combination of both depending on your individual circumstances. The Add/Drop process at the start of the term is the mechanism for any IFC enrollment changes, and, after that point, the course fee is non-refundable. Refer to the GEO website for full details on IFCs and be sure you understand the Course Policies and Course Fee & Financial Aid. Visit IFC Financial Aid for a quick assessment to determine your eligibility and process or contact finaid@hbs.edu for more information.

Enrollment: Limited to 45 MBA students (due to the nature of IFCs, auditing is not permitted)

Career Focus

The course will expose participants to the cultural, political, and economic environment in Singapore, offering an in-depth exploration of the ecosystem with particular focus on the government’s efforts to facilitate a durable and relevant innovation hub. The course is specifically designed to expose and evaluate the government’s role in fostering Innovation. We will also examine the role of Singapore in the evolving geopolitical environment, and will spend time on the various ways in which the Singapore Government has helped create the infrastructure, workforce, policies and incentives that attract entrepreneurs and private investors.

How much government support is enough? Is there a point at which support stifles innovation? How sustainable is the level of support? What is unique to Singapore and what translates cross-culturally?

The course will address these questions, examining the challenges of ensuring growth and long-term success on a global stage. Through interactions with government officials, investors, startups, multinational companies and academic centers, students will gain comprehensive insights into how each pillar functions. Our meetings will contemplate Singapore’s position in the APAC region, explore the role of its diverse population, stability, and transparency relative to other markets. We have secured a strong lineup of speakers, each leaders in their respective fields, to offer students a broad range of perspectives as they engage with the coursework.

Educational Objectives

Through immersing students in Singapore’s landscape and assessing the role of government programs and financial investment in driving this growth, exploration, and learning will center on a few key questions:

• The State of Singapore – How does the country’s industrial policy work?

Singapore’s industrial policy has attempted to catalyze its innovation economy. How has this worked in practice and how will Singapore attract, retain, and develop top talent? Are its education and immigration policies sufficient to support this growth?

• What impact does Singapore’s geographic location have on its growth?

• As a strategic hub in the Asia-Pacific region, how does Singapore's position enhance its appeal to global businesses and investors? Is there an arbitrage on China, and will Singapore have to pick sides?

• What is Singapore's five-year and ten-year vision, and what are the potential advantages and challenges?

• How do students assess Singapore's strategic goals over the medium and long-term horizon?

• What are the likely advantages and challenges that will emerge as the country aims to further cement its role as a

global hub?

• For the individual companies we visit throughout the course, how do Singapore’s policies and attributes help or impede their missions?

Course Content and Model

Overview and Introduction: In Fall 2026, we will hold approximately three sessions to provide students with a foundational understanding of Singapore’s rapidly expanding innovation landscape, framed around the government, finance, technology and biotech sectors. These sessions will highlight both the opportunities and challenges of launching and operating a venture within the region. Experts from Singapore’s private and public sectors will share their insights, offering a balanced perspective. The Fall classes will cover (preliminary): political history, geopolitical positioning, business environment and economic development, public/private partnerships and key sectors with a focus on information technology and biotechnology.

Upon arrival in Singapore in January, student teams will work with leading companies and governmental bodies. Throughout the week, they will attend meetings while getting to know and cross-functionally engaging with its representatives. At the end of the week, each team will present their findings, focusing principally on the role the region has played, on how the companies are influenced positively and negatively in the Singapore ecosystem and its intercross with the other pillars. The cohort will reconvene and present their view of the ecosystem to representatives.

Deliverables: Each student will present their personal take-aways. Final grades will consider: (i) participation and attendance during the class sessions in the Fall semester, as well as in Singapore; (ii) engagement with project partners; (iii) on-site activities; (iv) feedback from organizations; and (v) a final report.

Tours: Students will have the opportunity to take part in company and government visits as well as various cultural activities. Students will come to appreciate the unique operating environment in Singapore.

Course Credit and Fees

Students will receive 3 credits upon successful completion of this course.

HBS will provide logistical support for the immersion (including accommodations, select meals, and local travel arrangements). Students will be charged a course fee towards defraying a portion of these costs. Students are responsible for booking and paying for their own round-trip air travel and any costs associated with required visa documentation and immunizations. Students should ensure adequate processing time for all visas, as travel fees are not refundable if a student does not secure visas on time.

For detailed information about what the course program fee includes and excludes, as well as information about student accommodations, please visit the GEO website or email geo@hbs.edu.

GEO continuously evaluates the safety and logistical feasibility of running Immersive Field Courses in each location. Please be aware that IFCs can be canceled at any time due to changes in global health and safety or other unforeseen circumstances. Students will not be redistributed into another IFC, nor will a new course be developed. Course fees will be refunded.

Copyright © 2025 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Overview:

Physical infrastructure is an important aspect of economic development and regional and national well-being, as well as a growing investment category. Roads, bridges, rail, power generation, water, sanitation, data centers, airports, seaports and more are all crucial components of society. This course examines how the private sector is increasingly involved in conceiving, financing, building, operating, and realizing value from public infrastructure assets.

Career Focus:

This course will be particularly useful to students interested in infrastructure investing, in consulting around project selection and planning, in innovation in the built environment value chain, in economic development of cities and regions which depend on robust infrastructure, and in assessing return on investments in resilience.

Educational Objectives:

The course provides an analytical and operational toolkit for developing, financing, constructing, delivering, operating, and recapitalizing physical infrastructure. There is particular emphasis on private investment and public private partnerships. Why is infrastructure attractive to investors? Where are gaps and needs? Where in this complex value chain is their innovation and opportunity? What are the keys to investing in this asset class? How is working in emerging economies different than developed economies? How are assets exposed to natural catastrophe events?

Course Content and Organization:

The three modules track the chronology of project development, operation, and investing.

I. Inception: Project Finance and Development before financial close

II. Creation: Design, Construction, Operations

III. Realization: Repositioning, Refinancing and Leverage, Recapitalization, Exit

Grading / Course Administration:

50% Participation, 20% Polls and Quizzes, 30% Final Exam

Course Content Keywords:

infrastructure, real assets, project finance, resilient cities, power, water, transit, emerging economies, construction

Complements:

This course is a good complement to “Resilient Cities: Investment and Entrepreneurship” as well as “Energy, ““Real Estate Investing,” and “Real Estate Private Equity.”

Overview:

Innovating inside established organizations is no easy feat. Creating new ideas, products, services, or business lines is especially challenging when they break with traditional ways of working, risk cannibalizing existing sources of revenue, or involve uncertain and potentially high-stakes investments. Business history is littered with once-successful companies (like Blockbuster and Kodak) that failed to meet these challenges and innovate.

This course focuses on how to innovate at scale within established organizations, that is, how to build repeatable, sustainable innovation capabilities that deliver real, measurable value. We will focus on tackling three essential questions:

1. When should you innovate?

2. How can you make innovation happen?

3. Who should you partner with?

Through a combination of foundational theory, real-world cases, guest speakers, and a persuasion-focused exercise, we will build both conceptual understanding and practical tools. Emphasis will be placed on developing an innovation mindset: a career-differentiating ability to challenge the status quo, experiment smartly, and drive change from within established organizations across industries and geographies.

Career Focus:

This course is designed for students pursuing roles in general management, corporate strategy, innovation, product management, or venture functions within established firms; in strategy or technology consulting; or as operators in private equity portfolio companies. It will also benefit students looking to champion new ideas in complex, hierarchical environments.

Educational Objectives:

This course has three overarching learning objectives. By the end of the course, students will be able to:

• Make strategic decisions about when to lead with innovation.

• Build internal capabilities for product, process, and business model innovation.

• Forge high-leverage partnerships (through alliances, CVC, or strategic collaborations) to accelerate innovation.

Course Content and Organization:

This course will have three modules that support the key learning objectives of the class:

Module 1: When to innovate?

In this module, students will learn to determine when to lead and when to follow and how to enhance their effectiveness in driving innovation. Topics include: early mover advantage, follower advantage, imitation, and dominant design.

Module 2: How to innovate?

In this module, students will learn how to internally design innovation as a system by aligning enablers, choosing physical, digital, and network locations, building organizational architecture, and managing portfolios to create coherence and sustained impact. The module concludes with an in-class interactive exercise. Topics include: developing capabilities, location choice, workplace design, portfolio management, and build vs. buy decisions.

Module 3: Who to innovate with?

In this module, students will turn their focus to outside the organization and learn how to evaluate and select innovation partners. Topics include: partnering with philanthropic organizations and academia, running corporate venture capital funds, acquisitions and open source.

The course concludes with a wrap-up session synthesizing key learnings.

Scope:

This course will draw from industries such as automotive, beauty, gaming, energy, healthcare, technology, creative sectors, and more. We will cover geographies such as Argentina, China, Germany, South Korea, and the United States.

Grading / Course Administration:

Grading will be based on participation and a take home final (50/50).

Advisors: Executive Fellow Richard Boxer, MD; Executive Fellow Divya Srungaram, HBS MBA

Fall; Q1; 1.5 credits
Paper/project: business plan for an innovative health care venture.

Enrollment: limited to sixty students, including cross-registrants. The cross-registrants bring their skills in medicine, medical technology, bioscience, and digital and public health to this course.

Overview:

This course enables its students to fulfill the enormous opportunity to innovate the health care sector. Although it is the country’s largest sector and U.S. technological and clinical resources are renowned, health care remains too costly, too inaccessible, and too fragmented. Countless important technology innovations lie fallow. These opportunities to innovate health care exist globally.

The three sequential Innovating in Health Care (IHC) courses enable students to create the innovations that address these issues through continual polishing of their business plans. Prior students have walked the talk – virtually all of them have received substantial Series A funding, piloted their plans in top ranked institutions, arranged significant partnerships, and won numerous business plan competition awards.

The first course, IHC (Q1), contains an analytic framework for students who want to innovate the sector. In this enormous market, most innovations initially seem appealing, but they are not. Innovation is hobbled by powerful incumbents, complex reimbursement, and stringent public policy.

So how can you differentiate a viable idea from the others; how do you start and scale; and how do you exit? The Q1 course enables you to effectively answer these questions. It is taught through of-the-moment field-cased case studies of health care innovations that address them in all health care verticals, whose CEOs typically attend the course.

By incorporating the framework taught in the Q1 course, students prepare a business plan that creates an entrepreneurial opportunity in health care.

IHC (Q1) is the prerequisite for the next two field courses, Field Course: Creating Business plans for Innovating in Health Care (Q2) and Field Course: Advanced Business Plans for Innovating in Health Care (Q3, Q4). They culminate in students’ either obtaining funding for their business plan and/or customers. Powerful stakeholders attend virtually every class and often function as mentors/advisors in these subsequent two field courses.

In 2026, our student teams raised Series A financing; have approximately 40 AMC sites where pilots of their innovation are deployed, with several paid pilots; and were finalists in the President’s Innovation Challenge and won first and second place in the Black New Venture Competition. and other new venture competitions; and established partnerships with strategics. These successes complement the 2025 teams who obtained $8 million in seed funding and won the HBS Shark Tank prize; Grand Prize of Social Enterprise track at the New Vestures Competition; the iF Gold Design Award; and a Blavatnik fellowship. Another team launched its AI innovation in thirty clinics.

A diverse teaching team brings their wide-ranging experience across a variety of health care verticals. Their frequent comments and interactions with you as you progress in developing a business plan for a health care innovation combines their substantial experience with a practical focus and the latest cutting-edge market developments.

Alumni from this course sequence have become leaders or founders of important health care firms, health care advisors, and accomplished health care investors. These alumni and other experts often contribute their experience to the case and business plan discussions in these courses.

The students are drawn from HBS and other HU schools such as design/engineering, government, law, medicine, and public health. These students often form synergistic, lifelong professional networks.

Grading and Course Administration

Grades are based on informed, helpful participation in case discussion; support of fellow students; and your progress in creating a viable business plan.

Students are reminded of the Class Absence and Remote Attendance Policy

Enrollment: limited to sixty students, including cross-registrants. The cross-registrants bring their skills in medicine, medical technology, bioscience, and digital and public health to this course.

Educational Objectives:

The creation of a viable business plan that innovates healthcare. “Viable” means that students will obtain funding and/or participation in pilots of their innovation in top-ranked institutions, and/or significant partnerships, and relevant IP protection by the end of this three-course sequence.

The course enables this ambitious objective through:

1. Grounding in the friends and enemies in the health care ecosystem – and their likely impact on the innovation.
2. Developing strategies that can convert enemies into friends and friends into supporters.
3. Fashioning viable GTM and CAC strategies for starting, scaling, and exiting a health care innovation.
4. Building a support network with the many powerful stakeholders who are guests in the courses: they can help enable funding, contacts, and sound operating advice.
5. Creating a life-long network of colleagues with your fellow classmates.

Career Focus:

This sequence of courses focuses on enabling careers in healthcare entrepreneurship in any health care vertical: digital health, life sciences, insurance, interoperability, and delivery of clinical care.

Course content keywords:

Health care entrepreneurship, venture capital/PE funding, FDA regulation, insurance reimbursement/regulation, Medicare/Medicaid reimbursement/regulation, digital health, interoperability, care coordination, IP protection, EMRs, CROs, DTC strategies /CAC

Overview:

Managers invest a lot in developing new innovations --- but should those resources be spent renovating existing products instead?

How can the value of existing products be further developed?

How do I balance “renovating” my existing product line effectively with innovating to maximize the impact of my company, organization, product, or service?

We witness fascinating innovations everywhere. Yet, whether it will meaningfully reach and be used by a broad set of customers --- thereby making the greatest long-term impact --- is a question of whether the product line, and marketing strategy at-large, is effective in facilitating the diffusion of innovations.

We explore these questions in the spirit of former Coca-Cola CMO Sergio Zyman’s idea of “renovating” an innovation --- “… true renovation is making changes to something that already exists, leaving the essence intact but giving it a new vigor and perhaps a new life.”

The central questions of the course are (i) how one should assess the quality of an innovation, (ii) how and when a product or service should be extended within a category, and (iii) how and when a product line or service be broadened into adjacent product categories.

We explore these fundamental questions to uncover how to manage a product or service sustainably, and as the consumer and competitive landscape evolves and changes over time.

These questions are fundamental, because they are, at their core, capital allocation questions in addition to marketing strategy questions. Decisions about renovation versus innovation – and how value is created – shape revenue durability and return on capital investment. This course will seek to equip you with a disciplined framework for evaluating product line strategy not just as marketing, but as a driver of long-term enterprise value, competitive moats, and strategic optionality.

Educational Objectives:

The educational objective of this course is to help students develop a structured approach to evaluating how firms create and sustain value through products and services over time. Students learn to assess the quality of innovations, identify attractive market opportunities, and make informed decisions about when to launch new offerings, renovate existing products, or extend a brand into adjacent areas. The course emphasizes developing managerial judgment about how product and marketing decisions interact with broader strategic considerations such as competitive positioning, market evolution, and capital allocation.

By the end of the course, students will be able to diagnose product portfolio challenges, evaluate innovation opportunities, and make disciplined decisions about product line strategy and brand expansion.

Career Focus:

Students pursuing careers in consulting, investing, product management, strategy, or innovation will gain structured frameworks for evaluating growth opportunities and diagnosing where value is truly created, or destroyed, within a product portfolio. The course treats product and innovation decisions not as isolated marketing choices, but in the context of strategic capital allocation problems that shape long-term enterprise value.

The course is appropriate for students anticipating a career in which sensing opportunity for new products/services/business models and successfully bringing those ideas to market are key activities --- corresponding to the “innovation” part of the course title. It provides tools for identifying when to launch, extend, prune, or renovate a product line to sustain relevance as consumer preferences and competitive landscapes evolve.

Another key feature of the course is that it addresses the notion of “renovation” of the product line over time. We seek out to understand how to successfully manage and sustain a company and the product life cycle over time for long-term success. The course will cover a wide variety of contexts and thus be useful for those starting their own companies or joining an established organization.

Course Content and Organization

The course is organized around four thematic modules, each examining a different stage of how companies build, sustain, and extend successful products and brands.

Module 1 introduces the central challenge of market evolution, exploring how companies balance innovation with the renovation of existing products as markets develop. Through longitudinal case discussions, students examine how early category creation must eventually be complemented by strategic renewal to sustain growth. Module 2 focuses on sensing and assessing market opportunities, equipping students with frameworks to evaluate new product potential and understand how products evolve along the life cycle. Module 3 turns to product line extensions within a category, analyzing how firms manage line depth, refresh products, and address issues such as cannibalization and competitive positioning. Finally, Module 4 examines brand and category expansion, exploring how companies leverage existing brand equity to enter adjacent markets and manage product portfolios across multiple categories.

Across modules, students analyze a mix of recently developed cases and classic product policy cases, often studying the longitudinal evolution of firms and products rather than isolated decision moments. Many sessions include follow-up “B cases” or additional materials that reveal how strategic decisions played out over time.

Grading / Course Administration:

Grading will be based equally on “class participation” and a final exam. Part of class participation will be based on your submission of a short “one-pager” on your key learnings at the end of each module (up to 300 words). The Final Exam will be a typical case exam based on the concepts of the course.

Course Content Keywords:

Innovation Strategy Product Management Product Line Strategy Brand Extension Product Life Cycle Market Diffusion Portfolio Strategy


Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved

Course Overview

This is a course about exploiting the opportunities created by the emergence of a global economy and managing the risks that globalization entails. All managers now face a business environment where international, macroeconomic, and political phenomena matter. Understanding the genesis of financial and currency crises, stock market booms and busts, social and labor unrest, the rise of populism, and major swings in politics and policies is a crucial aspect in taking informed managerial decisions. Adverse macroeconomic and political phenomena can have a catastrophic impact on firm performance: witness the strong companies destroyed by the Mexican tequila crisis and those damaged by recent protests around the globe. Yet, such episodes also create business opportunities – and not just for the hedge funds and speculators that profit from them. Managers that have and use a coherent framework for understanding and analyzing these phenomena will enjoy a competitive advantage.

Career Focus

Internationally oriented careers; careers in global financial management; senior executive jobs; careers in policy-making.

Educational Objectives

The educational objectives of the IMaGE course are threefold.

First, the course aims to provide participants with a basic understanding of how contemporary macroeconomics explains dramatic events in the international economy, such as recurrent banking and financial crises in several countries. Much of this explanation focuses on the role of confidence, expectations, and crowd psychology. These factors result in aggregate behavior - e.g., demand in the U.S. economy as a whole - behaving in a different manner than would be suggested by simply summing individual behavior. This, in turn, justifies the establishment of macroeconomics as a separate discipline, distinct from microeconomics with its focus on individual firm and household decisions.

Second, the course discusses how institutions can be developed which focus the uncoordinated actions of individual households and firms as well as voters and politicians on good, rather than bad, overall outcomes. Such institutions are key determinants of macroeconomic and political outcomes. In some countries, legal, political, and economic institutions are able to coordinate private decisions on stable and productive paths. Where institutional development is weak - as seems to be the case in much of the developing world - private actions are poorly coordinated and the result is greater macroeconomic volatility, higher political risk, and slower growth. Understanding what constitute good institutions and how institutions influence economic and political behavior is therefore crucial.

Finally, the course is intended to develop a simple framework linking institutional design and macroeconomic performance. This framework can be used to evaluate how globalization is likely to change the performance of specific markets and thus assess the associated risks and opportunities.

Course Content and Organization

Most of the cases and class discussions focus on the country level, although several cases look at specific sectors (e.g., the retail industry in Chile, or the startup sector in Israel) or particular policies (inflation targeting in Brazil), and others span multiple countries (Chinese investments in Africa, or climate change). The course itself consists of four modules.

The first module ("Macroeconomic and Financial Dynamics") uses the experience of a famous economist (John Maynard Keynes) and several countries which have suffered through tremendous economic dislocation to identify and develop the issues of communication, confidence, coordination, and institutional development that are central to the remainder of the course. It investigates the mechanisms underlying recent macroeconomic and financial crises and explores their institutional underpinnings as well as their economic and political consequences. Representative cases include the Mexico Tequila crisis of 1994-95; Populism, banking crises, and exchange rate crises in Argentina; and Uganda and the Washington Consensus.

The second module ("Competing Institutional Models") studies how the U.S. and other rich countries have developed institutional structures permitting the coordination of individual business decisions on good economic outcomes, as well as their influences on macroeconomic policy design and performance. Moreover, it demonstrates how institutional differences across countries ultimately rest in differences in norms and beliefs, and explores how changes in the environment can render previously successful institutional structures outmoded, thereby creating both opportunities and risks for firms and households. Representative cases include Margaret Thatcher and the Blair wealth project; Latvia navigating the strait of Messina; Eliot Spitzer pushing Wall Street to reform; and Israel between the oligarchs and the startup nation.

The third module (“Politics: Influence and Unrest”) studies the dynamics leading to the creation and fissuring of political consensus on institutions, broad policy orientations, and specific policies. It gives special attention to the role of information influencing politicians’ choice of policy and the people’s preferences, as well as factors generating information bias. It explores the interactions between all stakeholders influencing policy-making (ruling elites, companies, media, and the people) and their impact on business. Representative cases include Lobbying in the chemical industry in the U.S.; Unrest in Chile, Looting at Walmart International; and Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News.

The fourth module ("The Future of Globalization") uses the macroeconomic and political economy tools and insights built in the previous modules to study the latest trends in globalization and their effects. It discusses how the increasing integration of international trade and of the global capital markets can affect the economic performance and generate political turmoil within previously successful and stable nations by undermining the internal coherence of the institutional structures on which their economic performance rested and the policy options available to them. Representative cases include the Trans-Pacific Partnership; Goodbye IMF conditions, hello Chinese capital: Zambia’s copper industry and Africa’s break with its colonial past; the 2012 Spanish labor reform; and Climate change: Paris, and the road ahead.

Copyright © 2024 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

IMCM is suitable for all students interested in gaining a broad perspective on investing and the asset management business. This includes both those targeting careers in asset management and those interested in learning how to manage effectively their personal wealth, current and future. This course aims at de-mystifying the world of investing as a black box full of incomprehensive complexity. While talent has a nature component, it also has an important nurture component. Investing is within the reach of any creative, motivated, well-trained individual – every student in the school.

The course has an eminently practice-oriented focus. Its main objective is to develop a framework for investing through the evaluation of specific investment decisions and opportunities across a wide array of public and private markets. Students learn how to evaluate any investment opportunity and, just as importantly, how to enhance value and how to build a deal flow, while developing the specific analytical tools that apply in each market and type of situation.

Students get a broad understanding of capital markets, assets classes, investing styles, and instruments (equity markets, bond markets, credit markets, real estate, privates, active and index investing, value and growth investing, activism, ESG investing, tail risk hedging, futures and swaps, etc.).

Students also explore investing from the asset owner perspective, learning modern practices in portfolio construction for personal and institutional investors (family offices, endowments, pension funds, and sovereign wealth funds). They examine portfolio construction and risk management, identification of investment talent and skill, investment vehicles, and costs (types of fees, taxes, etc.).

This course makes special emphasis on being current and on hearing directly from investors. The average age of each case in this course is short and sessions on capital markets and asset classes are updated every year. Classes often feature guest speakers to help students develop an up-close perspective on the issues raised in the case discussion and enhance students’ skills in investment decision making.

Course Content Keywords: investment management, security analysis, asset allocation, portfolio construction, public and private markets, active and passive management, behavioral finance, fixed income, equities, foreign exchange, investing, hedge funds, value and growth investing, bonds, stocks, asset classes

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Career Focus

Investment Strategies will be most beneficial to anyone considering a career in public market investing as an analyst or portfolio manager. However, knowledge of how public capital markets function is highly relevant to anyone considering a career in investment banking, consulting, private equity, venture capital, asset allocation, or wealth management. The course should also be relevant to future leaders of corporations who need to access public markets. Finally, the course should be relevant to anyone taking an active interest in managing their personal savings.

Educational Objectives

The course will focus on how public market participants value securities and how corporations interact with investors to accomplish certain objectives. The course should provide students with a framework for making investments in public equities and an understanding of several specific strategies. Students will be exposed to concepts and vocabulary used by professional investors.

Course Content and Organization:

The course is divided into three modules.

Introduction to Public Market Investing will give a brief overview of equity and fixed income markets and provide the context for undertaking an active investment management strategy versus indexing.

Shorting, Arbitrage, and Options will explore the role arbitrage plays in pricing event-driven, convergence trades as well as the mechanics of trading and shorting stocks. Option pricing in relation to cash markets will also be examined.

The final module, Value Investing, will focus on strategies where the catalyst for profiting from a perceived inefficiency may be more complex and less certain. In all three modules, we will discuss how investors price specific securities, manage exposures and position sizes, identify and analyze risk, and change positioning when new information comes to light.

Grading / Course Administration:

Please note that the following actions are essential requirements of Investment Strategies.

Regular class attendance, preparation, and participation. The course platform will be updated frequently. Adequate preparation includes checking for announcements and assignment questions prior to every class for updates and revisions.

Online submission of responses to class polls. Unless stated otherwise, polls are due at 9am the day of class. Occasionally you will be allowed to work in groups, but you should be prepared to explain your poll responses individually in class.

Completion of the exam. The exam will be a five-hour take-home exam.

Grades in Investment Strategies will depend on poll and assignment completion, class attendance, and participation (50%) and a final exam (50%).

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved

The MS/MBA Capstone is an intensive project-based experience that requires teams of students to apply and integrate the skills they have learned across the program curriculum. Specifically, teams will be expected to design, build (and hopefully, launch) a new technology-based product/service venture, and thereby to demonstrate mastery with respect to three fundamental areas of knowledge: Design Knowledge: The use of human-centered (and other) design methods to understand users, identify solutions to their needs, and gather feedback on solutions via rapid, iterative prototyping. Technical Knowledge: The use of rigorous system engineering methods to plan, design, develop, build, and test a complex technology-based product/service, integrating knowledge across diverse engineering disciplines. And Business Knowledge: The use of lean experimentation methods to develop and test a set of hypotheses that capture how the new product/service will create value, including business model design, customer value proposition, go to market (GTM) strategy, operating model and profit formula.

The Capstone comprises two related courses. The first course – Launch Lab 1 – is an immersive course completed over a 2-week period in January of the EC year (Capstone I). In the first week, student teams learn how to structure and execute a “Design Sprint” – a rigorous process for identifying problems, brainstorming solutions and building prototypes that can be tested with users. The Sprint process has been widely adopted by startups and large corporations and is a key technique for aspiring product managers. In the second week, teams develop an “Investor Pitch” for a business model that surrounds the new product/service concept they are working on. At the end of this week, teams then pitch their venture ideas to real investors and receive feedback on their viability and feasibility.

The second course in the capstone sequence – Launch Lab 2 – follows on and builds upon the work completed in January, meeting weekly in the spring term. In this course, the focus is on how to operate and run a venture after it receives funding. Lectures, cases and project work are used to help students develop operating plans for their businesses, draft job descriptions for key hires, and source potential advisors, etc. Throughout the capstone course, students must constantly decide whether to persist, pivot, or perish, with their venture ideas, though a series of defined Go/No Go milestones. Hence some students work on multiple ideas during the capstone sequence, whereas others bring one idea to fruition. Historically, several capstone ventures from each cohort receive funding from VCs.

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

The MS/MBA Capstone is an intensive project-based experience that requires teams of students to apply and integrate the skills they have learned across the program curriculum. Specifically, teams will be expected to design, build (and hopefully, launch) a new technology-based product/service venture, and thereby to demonstrate mastery with respect to three fundamental areas of knowledge: Design Knowledge: The use of human-centered (and other) design methods to understand users, identify solutions to their needs, and gather feedback on solutions via rapid, iterative prototyping. Technical Knowledge: The use of rigorous system engineering methods to plan, design, develop, build, and test a complex technology-based product/service, integrating knowledge across diverse engineering disciplines. And Business Knowledge: The use of lean experimentation methods to develop and test a set of hypotheses that capture how the new product/service will create value, including business model design, customer value proposition, go to market (GTM) strategy, operating model and profit formula.

The Capstone comprises two related courses. The first course – Launch Lab 1 – is an immersive course completed over a 2-week period in January of the EC year (Capstone I). In the first week, student teams learn how to structure and execute a “Design Sprint” – a rigorous process for identifying problems, brainstorming solutions and building prototypes that can be tested with users. The Sprint process has been widely adopted by startups and large corporations and is a key technique for aspiring product managers. In the second week, teams develop an “Investor Pitch” for a business model that surrounds the new product/service concept they are working on. At the end of this week, teams then pitch their venture ideas to real investors and receive feedback on their viability and feasibility.

The second course in the capstone sequence – Launch Lab 2 – follows on and builds upon the work completed in January, meeting weekly in the spring term. In this course, the focus is on how to operate and run a venture after it receives funding. Lectures, cases and project work are used to help students develop operating plans for their businesses, draft job descriptions for key hires, and source potential advisors, etc. Throughout the capstone course, students must constantly decide whether to persist, pivot, or perish, with their venture ideas, though a series of defined Go/No Go milestones. Hence some students work on multiple ideas during the capstone sequence, whereas others bring one idea to fruition. Historically, several capstone ventures from each cohort receive funding from VCs.

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Students can watch this video to learn more about the course.

Overview:

Launching Tech Ventures teaches founders the playbook for finding product-market fit by treating startups as experimentation machines, with a heavy focus on how modern AI tools accelerate that discovery process. Through case studies and intimate conversations with startup founders, the course examines the tactical management challenges and business model decisions that early-stage technology ventures face before achieving scale and enduring success.

Career Focus:

Launching Technology Ventures (LTV) is designed for four types of students:

1. Those who will start their own companies.

1. Those who will join early-stage startups (typically in a product manager, business development, sales, marketing, or growth role).

1. Those who will work at growth stage technology firms (in a similar range of roles) that try to maintain a similar, nimble operating model as a startup.

1. Those who are interested in investing in startups.

Educational Objectives:

Launching Tech Ventures (LTV) equips students with the frameworks, analytical tools, and practical judgment needed to navigate the earliest and most uncertain phase of building a technology startup — the search for product-market fit. Through case studies of early-stage founders across SaaS, fintech, climate tech, tough tech, and AI-native businesses, students learn to design and prioritize experiments across the customer value proposition, go-to-market strategy, product development, and business model design.

The course emphasizes quantitative rigor — including unit economics, cohort analysis, LTV/CAC modeling, pro forma financial analysis, cap table analysis — alongside qualitative judgment about pivots, competitive positioning, scaling decisions, and founder ethics. Students also develop hands-on fluency with modern AI tools as accelerants for prototyping, validation, and go-to-market execution.

By the end of the course, students will be prepared to think like founders who treat their startup as an experimentation machine, making disciplined, data-informed decisions under conditions of extreme uncertainty while building organizations that are resilient, ethical, and financeable.

Course Content and Organization:

The course is organized into six modules that mirror the journey of an early-stage technology startup from initial idea through financing and exit.

• Module 1: Ideation & Customer Value Proposition Experiments examines how founders generate and test startup ideas, evaluate product-market fit signals, and decide when to pivot — drawing on cases spanning B2C marketplaces, health IT, synthetic biology, and cloud security.

• Module 2: Go-to-Market Experiments shifts focus to customer acquisition and growth strategy, exploring decisions around API vs. application-based distribution, product-led vs. sales-led growth, burn rate management, and channel economics through cases in e-commerce, SaaS, AI-native software, and B2C digital banking.

• Module 3: Product-Market Fit Experiments deepens the analysis of business model quality, including market sizing, unit economics, pricing strategy, and the tension between investor expectations and customer needs, with cases in vertical SaaS, international expansion, generative AI middleware, and robotics.

• Module 4: Building in the Age of AI examines how founders can use contemporary AI tools to accelerate experimentation in the search for product-market fit. Through hands-on workshops on AI agents and rapid prototyping, students learn how to become 10x Founders and 10x Joiners, refining business models, building lightweight artifacts, and generating customer feedback more efficiently. The module emphasizes both the opportunities and limitations of AI-enabled building, helping students develop the practical skills and managerial judgment required to use these tools effectively in early-stage ventures.

• Module 5: Ecosystem and Ethics confronts the ethical dilemmas founders face — from venture capital governance failures and founder integrity to the responsibilities of scaling during a crisis — through cases on founder-VC ethics, health IT, and frontier AI.

• Module 6: Financing and Exits covers the mechanics and strategy of startup fundraising, including climate tech project finance, scaling decisions, cap table math, accelerator economics, pitching, and acquisition decisions.

Throughout all six modules, AI is woven in as both a subject of study and a tool students actively use to accelerate their analyses and experiments.

Grading / Course Administration:

Grading is calculated as follows:

• 40% class participation & engagement quality

• 20% online engagement quality (Slack, ChatLTV, Foundry, LinkedIn, X)

• 15% writing assignments (250-300 words each)

• 25% team project (end of semester)

Course Content Keywords:

Entrepreneurship; Startups; Product-Market Fit; Experimentation; Entrepreneurial Strategy; Startup Financing; Artificial Intelligence; AI Agents; Prototyping; Venture Capital

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved

Note: No student who is in the JD/MBA program, or who is an attorney, or who has completed one year of law school should enroll in LME.

Career Focus:

Every MBA should understand how law affects business. In addition to serving as a Senior Lecturer at HBS, I am a retired Securities Litigation Partner at WilmerHale in Boston. I draw upon examples from my practice and have designed the course to develop legal literacy by honing instincts that will help business leaders avoid legal pitfalls, attain a competitive edge and promote long-term success. Expanding well beyond the basic legal concepts introduced in LCA, the course will refine students’ understanding of how law affects all aspects of business and develop a deeper appreciation of how legal systems operate and how to operate within the boundaries of legal systems. The course includes a module on contracts and understanding legal documentation relating to private equity transactions and also explores intellectual property protection, securities law, and the legal issues involved in starting, joining or investing in start-ups and decision making from the time an entrepreneur conceives, starts to build and obtains financing through development of exit strategies.

No prior legal training is assumed. Class discussion will be based on both business school cases and other materials including excerpts from judicial opinions, statutes, news reports and analysis, and actual deal documentation.

Educational Objectives:

The course has four objectives:

• Explore the global legal environment, develop an approach to managing and maximizing the value of the corporate legal function, and analyze the dynamic nature of law;

• Develop literacy in: basic agency, contracts, legal documentation, torts, and the dynamics of litigation; explore intellectual property (IP), mergers and acquisitions (M&A), and the basics of bankruptcy; and examine contemporary issues in securities law, private equity transactions and regulatory responses to complex financial instruments;

• Enhance understanding of the legal life cycle of a start-up including structuring and financing issues, tax considerations, founder/investor conflicts, liquidity and exit issues; and

• Consider what’s customary and fair in various transactions and the communication challenges of translating legal advice and analysis into decision-ready advice managers can use.

Course Content and Organization:

• Day 1: Overview of the Course

Module 1: Contracts -- Basic & Complex

• Day 2: Contract Basics

• Day 3: What Does the Contract Say? What Does it Mean?

• Day 4: Complex Contracts: PE – Part I

• Day 5: Complex Contracts: PE – Part II

• Day 6: Contracts – Earnout Provisions

Module 2: Additional Building Blocks

• Day 7: Torts and Toxic Torts

• Day 8: IP – Patents and Patent Licenses

• Day 9: IP – Copyrights

• Day 10: Litigation and Litigation Strategy

• Day 11: Bankruptcy

• Day 12: Securities Law – What is a Security

• Day 13: Securities Law – Operating in the Securities Markets

• Day 14: Regulation of the Securities Market

Module 3: Starting & Growing Businesses

• Day 15: Breaking Away – Covenants not to Compete

• Day 16: Coming Together – Forming a Business

• Day 17: Choice of Organization

• Day 18: Financing a Start-up Company

• Day 19: Employers and Employees

• Day 20: Employment – Compensation

• Day 21: Break All The Rules? Uber/Airbnb

• Day 22: Break-down/Wash-outs: Downrounds

• Day 23: The Start-up vs. The Incumbent

Module 4: Succession & Liquidity

• Day 24: Exit Strategies or Not

• Day 25: PE Exits

• Day 26: IPOs – Old and New

• Day 27: Fulfilling the Promise – Dealing with Lawyers and Course Wrap

Contracts and Private Equity Documentation: Introduces contract law and builds on that introduction to develop an understanding of private equity deal documentation and the essential elements of the contracts underlying private equity transactions, including mergers.

Liability: Torts, Crimes, and Litigation over Major Transactions: explores the various types of liability and litigation encountered by businesses including basic torts and tort litigation, Merger and Acquisition litigation, IP lawsuits, antitrust suits, bankruptcy litigation, and criminal prosecution in the context of securities regulation..

The Legal Environment for Entrepreneurship and Exit Strategies: explores the role of the legal systems in creating and sustaining a climate that facilitates entrepreneurial activity and the role of counsel in helping to launch, grow and protect new businesses. It considers the following stages in the life cycle of a start-up: Formation (pre-formation issues, different forms of business organization, NDAs, contractual arrangements and other legal protections for corporate assets and opportunities, and governance and control under VCs); Employment Relationships (certain legal aspects of developing, rewarding and retaining employees, including non-competition agreements, assignments of rights, and employment litigation); and Growth and Exits (strategies for maximizing the value of intellectual property, founder/VC disputes , wash-outs, and legal aspects of exit strategies, including PE exits and IPOs).

Grading:

50% of the final grade will be based on class participation and 50% on a self-scheduled final exam.

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Leadership Execution and Action Planning (LEAP) focuses on the tenacity, tactics, and grit required to influence action across a wide range of organizational challenges. While traditional leadership courses contemplate “what” is leadership, LEAP focuses on “how” leaders must take action at critical moments to shape their organizations and their careers. The course helps students transition from a classroom understanding of leadership to the often-messy reality of rolling up one's sleeves and getting things done. It takes the point of view of a leader who: (1) is new to a situation, (2) must take action, and (3) is asked to operate within a system that she or he may not fully control or has not designed.

New leaders often stumble when tasked with closing the gap between a desired end-state and executing an action plan. LEAP is designed to give students pattern recognition and practice in developing action plans across a variety of challenges they are likely to face immediately after graduation, including: transactions (mergers), turnarounds, crisis management, scaling, reinvention, and career action planning.

The course will develop skills in diagnosing, designing, and executing complex actions. It forces students to contemplate the managerial tradeoffs and constraints they will face when tasked with achieving results.

An additional underlying theme of the course is on personal failure, highlighting the major missteps and early career challenges that leaders fall into. The course asks students to evaluate their own blind spots and shortcomings regarding leadership style, execution management, and career development. Through the lens of case protagonists at various stages of their careers, LEAP gives students the opportunity to practice identifying common execution traps and missteps.

LEAP is an integrated leadership course, building on concepts from organizational behavior, strategy, and general management. It brings these themes together in case discussions and exercises that focus on the personal decisions managers face in high-performance, high-stakes, and career-defining moments. Students will examine leaders in private and publicly owned companies, family businesses, and non-profits. The course will analyze the successes and setbacks of protagonists in each case, nearly half of whom will be present in class to discuss their views and, in some class sessions, to solicit student feedback about their ongoing execution challenges.

Course Objectives

LEAP has the following key learning objectives:

1. To enable students to get things done successfully.
   
   
2. To understand the risks, trade-offs, and constraints leaders face when tasked with achieving results under conditions where they have limited skills, time, and resources available.
   
   
3. To develop the leadership capabilities and interpersonal skills required to become an effective “implementer /operator.”

Underlying Themes and Goals

The industry, organization, and protagonist settings in the course are highly diverse. Cases will focus on protagonist perspectives ranging from the CEO to initial-entry positions (i.e., of the type that many students may experience soon after graduation). It offers a manager’s perspective on how to drive program execution.

This course will develop implementation and project management skills. A critical skill required of program managers is triage – developing and assigning priorities based on their urgency and importance. Successful execution also requires making tradeoffs given constraints of time, capital, talent, and political capital. LEAP will introduce students to several general tactics, common traps, and tools related to execution.

This course will focus on execution. The course focuses on the alignment of tactics required to drive performance across a range of business activities. Case Students will develop implementation approaches for existing business problems in each module. The course will illustrate how difficult projects get done, how policies and procedures get carried out, and how improvements are delivered.

This course provides frameworks to guide the process of developing and implementing action. LEAP demonstrates “how” to lead implementation efforts – from diagnosis to design to execution. It presents several frameworks to help students with various action-planning challenges:

• How to determine whether the “agreed upon” goal is actually an “achievable” goal.
• How to evaluate tradeoffs among resources.
• How to manage stakeholders in positions of power, both formal and informal.
• How to create alignment among the culture, formal organization, people, and critical tasks.
  
  

This course will emphasize learning from failure. A running theme throughout the course is overcoming adversity and learning from personal failure. Students are challenged to grapple with their own prior failures while analyzing management teams that have experienced major setbacks. Each module includes at least one business case where the leadership team failed to achieve their goals. Students will discuss how to manage failure, seek feedback, and make mid-course corrections. The intent is to develop the student’s ability to learn from failure and discuss how to overcome early setbacks in a career. Frequent protagonist participation will also provide students with access to seasoned executives who will discuss their biggest execution failures.

Course Module Structure

The course is organized into six modules that illustrate execution challenges where leaders may have a sound strategy, but “getting things done” is difficult and results may fall short of desired outcomes. While there is some overlap among modules on the course frameworks for action planning, the distinct lessons of each segment of the course are outlined below:

Module 1: Transactions Business transactions, particularly post-merger integration, are among the most difficult of leadership challenges business managers face in their careers. Even seasoned merger experts make catastrophic (and career-sabotaging) mistakes while leading through these complex periods of change. The transactions module discusses the common leadership pitfalls of merger integration, highlights management styles that seem relevant in successful merger leaders, and it offers approaches that can serve as a starting point for leading a merger process. Other topics include:

• Rigorously designing and executing integration.
• Choosing the right leadership team.
• Addressing conflicting organizational culture issues and retaining key talent.

Module 2: Turnarounds in For-Profit and Non-Profit Organizations Turnarounds represent a high-risk execution challenge for leaders. Leaders must make decisions about what to cut, who to cut, what to keep, and how fast it all must happen. This module focuses on the common mistakes, management styles of successful turnaround leaders, and action plans that can serve as the starting point for a leader tasked with managing a turnaround. Other topics include:

• Evaluating the conditions for change.
• Creating and communicating a turnaround narrative.
• Protecting the base business while changing direction and creating forward movement.

Module 3: Crisis Building on the turnaround module, here we examine how the added elements of restricted time and lack of information combine to create unique challenges for companies in crisis situations. Unlike a turnaround, a crisis can be a catastrophic event, or a series of seemingly small events, that often surprise leaders. Most organizations are not designed to prevent or manage crises; it is not a question of if a crisis will happen, but when, and what kind. Other topics include:

• Examining tradeoffs between taking immediate action and acting with an untested approach.
• The challenge of leading in situations where confusion and chaos often exist.

Module 4: Scaling Expansion is inherently risky to an incumbent organization’s existing architecture. Scaling a business, particularly into new geographical markets or product categories, involves addressing cultural, administrative, and economic tradeoffs. Successful leadership in these scenarios requires managers who are capable of action planning for growth, as well as exerting control and influence across cultural, political, and economic divides. Other topics include:

• Developing an organizational architecture that supports the expansion into new product-classes, market categories, and geographic regions.
• Maintaining an organization’s culture and values while attempting to professionalize and create formal systems and structures.

Module 5: Reinvention Reinvention is a process whereby established organizations respond to external environmental shifts that threaten to upend their core business model, technologies, cultural values, and/or operational norms. Reinvention represents a managerial paradox: executives must both preserve and change aspects of the business that once made them successful but could render the organization obsolete in the near future. This module will examine several mature businesses that faced a near collapse and how their leaders attempted to redefine the organization to attract new consumers and markets. Other topics include:

• How innovations affect mature organizations and how to respond to technological shocks.
• How firms both preserve and change elements of “what we do” (their strategy) and “who we are” (their organizational identity).
• How to attract new talent and infuse confidence back into a workforce that has suffered a significant downfall.

Module 6: Action Planning Your Career The career module focuses on analyzing career paths, tradeoffs between personal ethics and success, and, importantly, navigating failure. The module provides students an opportunity to contemplate their career objectives. It provides students with examples of overzealous life planning and the unforeseen interpersonal dilemmas that can derail a career plan. Additional key topics are:

• The tradeoffs between mapping career goals and maintaining work-life balance.
• Career resiliency and overcoming early failures after graduation.
• Individual action plans related to career transitions that students will face in the next 5-10 years.

Grading and Evaluation

Course grades are based on three components: class participation, written action-planning exercises, and a final exam.

• Class participation comprises 45% of the grade. Participation will be evaluated for both frequency and quality. As part of the participation grade, students will also submit a short written analysis of a failure they experienced in their professional endeavors prior (or during) their time at HBS. The essay will describe a significant failure, discuss lessons learned from the failure, and how the student dealt with the aftermath. Several individuals (4-5) per section will be chosen to present their failures and the lessons learned to the rest of the class at the end of the semester.
• A midterm written exercise that outlines an action plan, along with short action planning write-ups throughout the semester, offer opportunities to practice and apply course frameworks. The midterm and write-ups comprise 20% of the grade.
• A written final exam will be scheduled during the exam period following the last day of class. It will mirror the format of the midterm written exercise. Students are not required to be on campus to take the exam. The final comprises 35% of the grade.

Course Content Keywords:

Leadership and execution of Strategy and Transformational Programs

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Overview:

Family businesses dominate the economies of most countries. According to research by McKinsey, businesses owned by families account for more than 70% of global GDP and 60% of global employment. They range in size from the corner store to the conglomerate, and include industry leaders in many sectors. Most family businesses begin as decisions made by founders to continue the legacy of what they have built by passing ownership down to their children. For those embarking on an entrepreneurial journey, it may turn into a family business at some point.

Career Focus:

The course will be relevant if you plan to:

• Work for a business that is owned by your family
• Be an owner of a family business, even if you don’t intend to work there
• Serve as a board member of a family business
• Explore the option of being the non-family leader of a family business
• Plan to start a business that you may decide to keep rather than sell

While the emphasis of the course will be on operating companies, there will be relevant takeaways for those planning to take a leadership role in a family office or family foundation.

Educational Objectives:

The objective of the course is to prepare you for the unique challenges and opportunities that accompany running a family business. It will address the following core questions:

• What is unique about family businesses compared to other kinds of companies? Are they more vulnerable to failure?

• What are the main types of family businesses and how does leadership vary across them?

• What kind of governance (family, corporate, etc.) is required to make effective decisions in a family business?

• How do you define success in a family business that goes beyond maximizing shareholder returns?

• How do you build and sustain competitive advantage?

• How do you plan for effective succession and transition of leadership?

• What are the key strategies for managing conflict?

• How do you create a career path as a family member or non-family member?

• How do you expand a family business beyond its original core?

• How do you turn around a once-successful family business that is struggling?

• When is the right time to sell the family business? How do you navigate that process?

• What are the danger zones and warning signs that leaders need to pay attention to?

Course Content and Organization:

The course will be divided into two main modules. The first module will focus on building the core leadership toolkit across topics such as strategy, governance, and succession. The second module will emphasize specific opportunities and challenges that leaders will likely encounter, such as how to navigate the career progression or turnaround a family business that has fallen on challenging circumstances.

Each session will involve a case discussion. Some of the cases will be of the standard variety and some will be “live cases” where the leaders from family businesses will be integrated throughout the session. Most cases will include a guest speaker who will share their leadership experiences and answer questions. Cases in the 2026 version included:

• 99 Ranch

• Carvajal S.A

• Chick-fil-A

• COFRA/C&A

• J.M. Huber

• J. Perez Foods

• Mars

• Milo’s Tea

• Murdoch and Fox News

• Pentland Brands

• White Castle

The core text for the course will be Harvard Business Review’s Family Business Handbook, written by Josh Baron and Rob Lachenauer.

Grading / Course Administration:

Students will be graded on a mixture of engagement in class, a group project, and a short paper. Students will be assigned into groups that will meet 2-3 times during the semester to share ideas from the course and personal experience. Each group will make a presentation about their lessons learned. For the final paper, you will draw on your learnings from the course to develop a leadership plan. That plan will synthesize your views on what makes leadership of a family business similar and different from a non-family business, what type of leadership roles you might explore in a family business, a personal assessment on what skills you need to develop to succeed in that role(s), and an action plan to build those skills.

Course Content Keywords:

Family business, family office, founder, family foundation

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Overview:

MACRO explores the mechanics of major macroeconomic crises and uses them as a laboratory to learn macroeconomics. Through historical and contemporary episodes of inflation, sovereign default, currency collapse, sudden stops, and financial instability, students develop tools to understand how economies break down, how crises spread, and how stabilization and recovery can occur. The course emphasizes positive macroeconomic analysis and uses case studies and current events to connect theory to real-world decision-making.

Students should choose this course if they want a deeper understanding of the macroeconomic forces that shape business environments, government policy, and global markets. The course is particularly valuable for students interested in general management, investing, finance, global business, public policy, international institutions, emerging markets, and economic consulting. It is also useful for students who expect to operate in environments exposed to inflation, exchange rate instability, debt crises, or major policy shifts.

MACRO is designed as a modular half-course and can also complement other BGIE economics offerings, particularly courses focused on the role of government, globalization, and political economy.

Career Focus:

This course helps students build a macroeconomic toolkit that is valuable across a wide range of careers. Students interested in finance and investing will gain frameworks for assessing sovereign risk, inflation dynamics, currency instability, and financial fragility. Students pursuing careers in consulting, general management, or multinational business will learn how macro crises affect firms, consumers, supply chains, and strategic decisions across countries. Students interested in public policy, development, or international institutions will strengthen their ability to evaluate stabilization programs, exchange rate regimes, debt restructuring, and the political economy of crisis response.

The course is especially relevant for students with an interest in emerging markets, global capital markets, central banking, international organizations, geopolitical risk, and business strategy in volatile macroeconomic environments.

Educational Objectives:

By the end of the course, students will be able to:

• Diagnose macroeconomic vulnerabilities using theoretical tools and real-world evidence.
• Understand how crises propagate across countries, markets, and institutions.
• Evaluate stabilization strategies, including exchange rate regimes, fiscal adjustment, monetary policy, and debt restructuring.
• Apply lessons from past crises to assess current and future global macroeconomic risks.

More broadly, the course develops students’ ability to connect macroeconomic theory to major business and policy questions, especially in periods of stress and uncertainty.

Course Content and Organization:

The course is organized around major categories of macroeconomic crises and the policy responses used to address them. Each module uses cases from past and current episodes to illustrate the underlying theory and to compare how different institutional settings shape outcomes.

Indicative modules may include:

• Inflation and money regimes
  Topics may include hyperinflation, the return of inflation in advanced economies, and new monetary arrangements such as stablecoins and central bank digital currencies.
• Sovereign debt, deficits, and fiscal dominance
  Topics may include debt sustainability, IMF-supported adjustment programs, fiscal crises, sovereign default, and the interaction between politics and macro stabilization.
• Currency and trade crises
  Topics may include exchange rate collapses, sudden stops, trade shocks, and the macroeconomic consequences of disruptions to global integration.
• Financial fragility
  Topics may include banking crises, shadow banking, financial contagion, and new forms of unregulated finance.
• Safe assets and international monetary leadership
  Topics may include the rise and decline of reserve currencies, dollar hegemony, and scenarios of fragmentation in the global monetary system.
• Political economy, corruption, and crisis dynamics
  Topics may include the interaction between macroeconomic instability, institutional weakness, scandal, and political change.

Across these modules, students will engage with frameworks such as debt sustainability, balance of payments adjustment, inflation and disinflation dynamics, expectations-driven crises, contagion, and stabilization policy. The course is case-based and may draw on both historical and contemporary crises to help students assess present-day risks.

Grading / Course Administration:

Grading will be based on:

• 75% class participation
• 25% final exam or final case analysis

Because the course is case-based and discussion-driven, regular attendance, preparation, and active participation are important expectations. There is no required team-based work. Cross-registrants are permitted.

Course Content Keywords:

Macroeconomics, inflation, sovereign debt, currency crises, financial instability, emerging markets, international finance, monetary policy, political economy, global risk

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved

Overview:

Making decisions is integral to every manager’s job. Making Difficult Decisions: The General Manager’s Role (MDD) explores decisions made by general managers (GMs) and how context influences both the nature of their choices and the effectiveness of their decisions. The course views management as a crucial activity for enabling coordinated action in pursuit of organizational performance. Our emphasis is on how GMs get things done through making and guiding decisions – both large and small. We show how to use decision-making processes to produce results and to move organizations forward. The course explores how context affects strategic and operational decision making, shaped by how managers think (cognition) and communicate (conversation) about the situation at hand. We define context broadly – to include industry, the work, and the human group facing the situation. Our goal is to examine cognitive, interpersonal, and organizational factors that undermine effective decision making and to introduce techniques for diagnosing and overcoming predictable pitfalls. Decisions are particularly challenging for general managers because they must rely on others – principally subordinates – to provide critical input, and to implement what is decided. The major constraint facing most managers is not their vision, but the resources available to them. Therefore, the essence of general management lies in understanding and harnessing the capabilities of those around them. Effective decision making goes beyond merely knowing what one wants to accomplish. It requires developing a vision based on a clear-eyed evaluation of the capability of those around you, communicating that vision, gathering and considering feedback, overseeing implementation and responding to the unexpected. These are the practical skills required for effective GMs – and developing them is a lifelong endeavor.

Career Focus:
The purpose of the course is to help launch a lifelong learning journey to support ongoing personal and professional development as a manager. Our aim is to improve students’ ability to make and implement better decisions in complex, interdependent contexts involving subordinates, superiors, and even members of other groups or organizations. The course design reflects the following assumptions: This ability is relevant to all students and managers and is not strictly the province of general managers. Everyone has distinct behavioral and attitudinal ‘footprints’ that shape how we make decisions. Being aware of one’s footprint and developing the self-awareness to make better decisions and implement them with more fidelity is a valuable skill for any manager/leader. 

Educational Objectives:
Making Difficult Decisions places particular emphasis on frameworks that help managers make, communicate, and implement decisions effectively. These skills include interpreting and crafting dialogue, diagnosing one's own biases to reduce the likelihood of error, and understanding and altering group dynamics. We also examine the role of incentives – formal and informal, real and imagined – in driving behavior. We treat decision making as a process and explore the major considerations involved in designing effective decision processes. The course does not address decision-making tools such as data analytics, game theory, and simulations. Developing aptitude in and understanding of these issues positions managers to influence the design, direction, and functioning of organizational processes. The aim of MDD is thus to develop students' understanding and use of highly relevant, practical skills that enhance their ability to make better decisions and to improve their own and their team's performance in decision making generally. Throughout, our focus is on processes that are of primary interest to general managers. Case protagonists thus usually have positions of significant responsibility.

Course Content and Organization:
A distinctive feature of MDD is its variety of teaching materials, including experiential exercises, role-plays, multimedia cases, and visits from case protagonists, in addition to HBS paper case studies. Settings are varied as well. They range from startups to large multinationals in a wide variety of industries from software development to financial services, life sciences, and manufacturing. MDD also features non-business protagonists and situations, including high-level government taskforces, mountaineering expeditions, hospital administrators, and engineers in the space program. MDD includes three types of sessions, interspersed throughout the semester, to teach a set of related ideas and frameworks.

Session Type I:  MDD utilizes many HBS Case Study classes – spanning sectors, industries, and organization size. In each, GMs face one or more important decisions, and wrestle with multiple challenges. These cases include traditional paper and multimedia formats. As in any HBS classroom, students are expected to participate regularly and actively in these discussions. Good contributions offer clear, rigorous argument, present detailed substantive recommendations, describe a coherent, internally consistent perspective or point of view, move the discussion forward by posing questions or drawing links between others’ comments, present relevant examples from personal experience or constructively critique positions, sharpen the class’s understanding of issues, or deepen an ongoing debate.

Session Type II:  MDD includes 7 “lab sessions” that allow students to practice management skills in realistic simulated conversations. These will come in two forms. First, sessions that take place in the regular classroom rely on short vignettes based on a disguised real-life situation distributed at the beginning of class. They present a single situation, with a protagonist who must determine what to do. Students will experiment, receive real-time feedback from instructors and/or each other, and observe others, in an effort to develop practical management skills.  Second, we include in depth role-play exercises in which students work in small groups in Batten and Chao. Practice and repetition are used to help students understand how to put into action concepts introduced in case discussions and mini-lectures.

Session Type III:  The course may also include Dialogues, or conversations with successful GMs, who share their experiences and engage in conversations driven by student questions.

Grading / Course Administration: The work for MDD includes case preparation, participation in case discussions, and participation in lab sessions; 40% of a student’s grade will be allocated based on participation in class discussions (including dialogue sessions with guests); 20% based on participation in lab sessions, and 40% based on a final written submission. In lieu of a final exam or paper, students are asked to prepare a written self-diagnosis reflecting on – and applying – the frameworks and competencies that they are developing throughout the semester.  These submissions, which reflect work done throughout the semester and are not expected to require extensive time after classes end, could involve:

Reflecting on your current decision-making approach and/or behavioral footprint (mindsets and behavioral habits that shape your effectiveness in difficult moments) by reflecting on your previous experiences, or your motivations for taking the course.

Reacting to situations presented in one or more of the case studies—what are the principal lessons you drew from a case or cases? How do you think you would have reacted in the protagonists’ shoes?

Describing insights taken from lab sessions and experiences trying to apply course frameworks or competencies, such as those of Chris Argyris and David Kantor.

Developing a personalized "self-awareness" plan of action to use after graduation. Such a plan should include, but not be limited to, reflections on your footprint and identification of "watch outs" or "trigger points" that threaten your ability to be a more effective decision maker, a list of tools and techniques to use in managing decision making processes and in managing difficult conversations and for diagnosing group dynamics.

These foci will constitute the body of submission, which should be developed over the course of the semester. An effective reflection will build on and return to notes/ideas produced early in the semester, and consider what’s changed, while building a compendium of ideas for how to check less productive instincts and overcome shortcomings or weaknesses in interpersonal and other management skills in the months and years ahead. 

Course Content Keywords: General management, decision making, strategy, leading teams and organizations. Strategy, senior leadership teams, conversation skills, framing, management, results, General management, decision making

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Overview:

Managing Human Capital is designed to teach practical skills for future general managers who must lead and develop people while also managing their own careers. The course focuses on three core capabilities: people development, people management, and career management. Building on foundational leadership concepts introduced in LEAD, the course explores people-related challenges that effective managers must understand in order to lead organizations successfully.

The course is grounded in the idea that human capital—the knowledge, skills, and potential of people—can drive organizational performance. How managers hire, develop, motivate, and retain talent can become a source of sustainable competitive advantage for organizations and individual leaders. Through case discussions, workshops, and guest speakers, students will explore how leaders create workplaces where talented people gather, perform, develop, and thrive.

Career Focus:

This course prepares students for leadership roles that involve managing people and building high-performing teams. The content is particularly relevant for students pursuing careers in general management, entrepreneurship, consulting, technology leadership, and other roles that require leading organizations and developing talent.

Students will gain practical skills in hiring, onboarding, motivating, developing, and managing employees—capabilities that are essential across industries and organizational contexts. The course also emphasizes managing one’s own human capital, helping students think strategically about their own professional development and career trajectory.

Educational Objectives:

The central question of the course is: How can leaders create organizations where talented people gather, produce, develop, and thrive?

While conceptually simple, this challenge is increasingly complex in modern workplaces shaped by changing employee expectations, technological advances such as artificial intelligence and data analytics, and evolving organizational structures.

The course aims to help students:

• Understand how human capital management drives organizational performance.

• Develop practical skills for hiring, developing, motivating, and retaining employees.

• Learn how organizational practices shape employee engagement and productivity.

• Apply leadership frameworks to real-world managerial challenges.

• Reflect on and manage their own human capital and career development.

Throughout the course, students will analyze human capital management through three complementary perspectives: managing others, being managed by others, and managing one’s own career.

Course Content and Organization:

The course is organized into four thematic modules that examine key stages of managing human capital within organizations. The course combines several types of learning formats designed to integrate conceptual insights with practical application. Sessions include (1) case-based discussions of real organizational challenges, (2) interactive leadership labs that allow students to practice management skills, and (3) guest speakers who bring practitioner perspectives from senior leadership and industry roles.

Introduction

The course begins with an overview of the importance of human capital in organizational performance and introduces the core managerial challenge of creating workplaces where talented individuals gather, contribute, develop, and thrive.

Module 1: Finding Talent (Hiring)

This module focuses on how organizations identify and recruit the talent they need. Topics include defining role requirements, evaluating candidates, and using emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and data analytics in recruitment processes. Students will also practice techniques for conducting effective interviews.

Module 2: Forging Talent (Socialization)

This module examines how organizations onboard and integrate new employees. Topics include organizational culture, early career development, socialization processes, and how managers can structure onboarding experiences that set employees up for long-term success.

Module 3: Fueling Talent (Compensation and Rewards)

This module explores how organizations motivate employees through compensation systems and reward structures. Discussions address incentives, equity and ownership models, and how compensation policies influence behavior, collaboration, and organizational performance.

Module 4: Fostering Talent (Performance Management and Development)

This module focuses on how managers support employee growth and maintain high performance over time. Topics include performance evaluation, feedback and coaching, talent development, and difficult managerial decisions such as managing underperformance and employee separation.

Grading / Course Administration:

Final grades will be determined based on the following components:

• Class Participation: 50%
  Active engagement in case discussions, workshops, and guest sessions is a central component of the learning experience.

• Assignments: 5%
  Short assignments designed to reinforce concepts and prepare students for class discussions.

• Final Project: 45%
  Students will complete a final project applying course concepts to a human capital challenge. Projects will be presented during the final class session.

Course Content Keywords:

human capital, difficult conversations, general management, Human Resources, talent management, learning and development, leadership, career management

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved

Overview:

Most companies compete through service. Few are designed to deliver it well.

Service businesses dominate the economy. They account for 80% of U.S. GDP and the vast majority of roles HBS graduates enter. Service is the business of people helping people. Yet most organizations are built around products, functions, or cost targets. They are not built around customers, employees, or the reality of service delivery.

The result is predictable: inconsistent experiences, disengaged employees, and missed growth.

Managing Service Operations (MSO) focuses on how to design and run service organizations that perform.

Students will learn how to:

• Design service models that create advantage and are hard to copy
• Make trade-offs across cost, quality, and growth
• Engage customers as active participants in service delivery
• Build employee systems that drive performance and retention
• Use operational data and customer feedback to improve over time

The course is built around real operating decisions across industries where execution quality drives outcomes.

Career Focus:

MSO is a general management course for roles where execution determines performance.

It is especially relevant for:

• Operators with P&L responsibility
• Leaders scaling service-heavy businesses
• Consultants working on transformation or performance improvement
• Investors assessing business quality and durability

The course applies across sectors, including financial services, healthcare, hospitality, retail, professional service, industrial services, and technology-enabled services.

Educational Objectives:

By the end of the course, students will be able to:

1. Connect strategy to execution
• Translate value propositions into operating model choices
• Identify where misalignment destroys value
2. Make better operating decisions
• Evaluate trade-offs across cost, quality, speed, and growth
• Understand second-order effects on customers and employees
3. Manage customer-driven growth
• Link service performance to retention, expansion, and profitability
• Use customer behavior to inform investment decisions
4. Build scalable organizations
• Design roles, incentives, and workflows that sustain performance
• Improve consistency without limiting adaptability

Course Content and Organization:

The course follows four modules that reflect how service organizations are built and improved:

1. Designing Service Organizations

• Strategy, differentiation, and alignment
• Defining its service model and value proposition

2. Engaging Customers

• Designing customer journeys that drive both experience and economics
• Managing variability and customer participation
• Customer selection and compatibility

3. Elevating Employees

• Workforce design and productivity
• Employee value proposition and performance systems
• Role of AI and automation

4. Promoting Learning and Growth

• Learning from customers
• Scaling service models
• Leading transformation

Grading / Course Administration:

• Class participation: 50%
• Field exercises: 20%
• New Service Design Project (team project): 30%

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved

Overview:

Financial services firms play a critically important role in the global economy. They finance investment, facilitate payments, and help firms and households save and manage risk. These financial services are provided in an array of organizations and structures – from fintech startups to private credit funds to multi-trillion-dollar global banks and large insurance companies – in an industry that is always under the threat of disruption.  There is no industry that has seen as much disruption – both good (innovation) and bad (crisis) – as financial services.

In Managing and Innovating in Financial Services, we examine the challenges and opportunities faced in financial services as incumbent firms and startups try to navigate and shape an environment in which competition, technology and regulation are constantly changing.

We will look at a variety of financial institutions and financial service providers including banks, nonbank financial intermediaries, insurance companies and fintechs. We will examine decisions through the lens of these firms with government policy and regulation as an important factor that often shapes their decisions.

Career Focus:

• If you’re interested in becoming an entrepreneur in financial services, there are three related ways this course can be helpful. First, almost half the cases consider entrepreneurs in finance or financial services startups; understanding their journeys will inform you about the opportunities and challenges. Second, the course is designed to help you better understand the financial services landscape and thus help you identify and evaluate entrepreneurial opportunities. Third, you will learn about the types of partner firms you will need to succeed as an entrepreneur in financial services, whether banks, Banking-as-a-Service providers, or payment processors, to name a few.

• If you want to be an investor – in private equity, private credit, or capital markets – you need to understand how the financial system works. This course provides a holistic view of the financial system. I know of no other course at HBS or other business schools that provides a broad overview of the financial system. Moreover, as an investor you will likely be heavily dependent on the availability of credit, which is a principal focus of this course.

• If you want to work at an established financial intermediary -- at a bank, insurance company, or payments company -- this course is highly relevant for obvious reasons. Relatively few HBS students will start out working in these types of firms – particularly the more mature versions of these companies – but many will eventually land in these types of firms or end up consulting for them.

Educational Objectives:

The course provides both a broad overview of the financial system and explores the many connections among financial intermediaries in the financial system. At the same time, we will go deep on important functions of the financial system including credit, insurance and payments.

Course Content and Organization:

The course is divided into four modules. 

Module 1: Banking. In this module, we will study the business of banking. Banks are worth studying both because they are important credit providers and because of their unique role in the payment system: they are the only entities that can hold accounts at the Federal Reserve and are thus critical for moving money across the financial system.  You can’t understand innovation and tech disruption without understanding the basics of banking. There are three reasons why. First, many of the problems innovators are trying to solve are focused on gaps in banking services, while many of the challenges these innovators face stem from the fact that they are not banks. Second, there are many opportunities to help banks get better; much of fintech is about providing services to banks. Third, many innovators depend on banks as their partners – either to provide credit to them or to facilitate their financial transactions, both in lending and in payments. In this first module, we will seek to understand the drivers of value in banking.  This will involve getting up to speed on understanding bank financial statements and valuation, which are likely unfamiliar to you even if you’ve worked in finance.  We will develop a set of tools that will be valuable in evaluating banks, nonbank financial intermediaries, fintechs, and insurance companies. We will also examine when things go terribly wrong in banking by examining the Silicon Valley Bank crisis, the Global Financial Crisis, and the ongoing regulatory response to both.

Module 2: Credit. We will focus on the main types of credit: residential mortgages, small business loans, consumer credit, and lending to middle-market (private credit) and large firms. Our main focus will be on firms that are innovating in the way they provide these loans. Some of these firms are fintechs, but others are banks and yet others are nonbank financial intermediaries like business development companies and private credit funds. We will develop a framework for understanding how a credit intermediary creates value.

Module 3: Insurance. Insurance comprises about one third of the financial sector, and firms in this sector are playing an increasing role in the financial lives of individuals and in the allocation of credit to the corporate sector. Large asset management firms are also getting involved in insurance because they see insurance as a stable source of funding, well-suited to making illiquid investments. This module will focus on both property and casualty (P&C) and life insurance, including the evolving role that asset management firms are playing in insurance and retirement services. 

Module 4: Payments. We will explore the payments system and the innovations taking place in that sector. Much fintech activity in this area builds off the traditional payment rails. We will review these traditional payment rails, discuss firms that are trying to bundle payments with credit and other services, and examine cross border payments.  We will also study modern forms of money movement – in particular, stablecoins and tokenized deposits – and discuss both their strengths and limitations.

Grading / Course Administration:

50% class participation/50% paper or project

Course Content Keywords:

Fintech, banking, insurance, payments, blockchain, credit, private credit, financial regulation

Copyright © 2025 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Overview:

Each year, hundreds of HBS students walk across the Commencement stage with plans to take on an advisory role, whether consultancy or joining a partner-based organization. In addition, many more also prepare to enter other careers where their roles will be more advisory than operational. In most cases, these students have no direct advising background whatsoever. For those who have worked as an analyst or summer intern, never has their prior experience had less bearing on their post-MBA career. Before these students lies a daunting challenge: facing the most challenging market conditions in over a decade, they must quickly prove themselves as a skilled advisor to executives, relying only on introductory firm training and apprenticeship learning. This course thus aims to address a critical and timely need within the HBS curriculum by offering students a comprehensive and integrated approach for attaining success in their post-MBA role as advisors and counselors.

Given the ongoing challenges of today’s landscape, Mastering Consulting and Advisory Skills (MCAS) seeks to develop critical consulting skills among a core group within the EC: aspiring, committed consultants who need to build competency to immediately add meaningful value to their teams, client organizations, and firms. By focusing on applied skills and fundamental mindsets, MCAS aims to differentiate students from the pack and prime them for impact from Day 1.

This course addresses a growing demand within both HBS and the consulting firms many HBS students join after graduation. It was created by Senior Lecturer David Fubini, who spent 34 years at McKinsey & Company, during which time he established and headed the firm’s Boston office, as well as led a number of critical organizational and strategic practices. Professor Fubini developed the course with input from HBS students, who wanted to chart fulfilling and successful careers in consulting, and from Partners at major consultancies, who recognized that many MBAs arrive unprepared amid a changing professional services landscape. The course design also builds on the historically successful EC course Professional Firm Management, and leverages learning from the Leading Professional Services Firm Executive Education course. The outcome is a course curated by and for aspiring-consultant students, that is taught by a deeply experienced practitioner, and which fills a critical white space within the HBS curriculum.

Career Focus:

Mastering Consulting and Advisory Skills seeks to help students gain a comprehensive knowledge of the tools, skills, frameworks, and mindsets required to be successful across all facets of their advisory/consultative roles. While many consulting firms’ initial training programs highlight the skills required to complete key tasks—performing analyses, building models, crafting presentations—they are, by necessity, short and introductory only. This course goes deeper. Grounded in the understanding that relationships are paramount to success as an advisor, this course covers how to manage teams, partners, clients, firm politics, and the consultant’s life and career. Understanding the complexities of the role, this course will present students with complex and difficult situations to develop strategies for dealing with industry-specific dilemmas. The course covers this material through a mix of cases, workshops, and discussions.

This course provides students with an academic and pragmatic lens to consulting in order to create a comprehensive toolkit they can use in both consulting and industry roles. Importantly, it does so in a foundational way that will build on summer internships and other consulting experiences, while still remaining accessible to committed newcomers. It moreover does so as a short course in order to deliver on only the most essential learnings. With this course, students can start their careers with a meaningful set of skills they can apply before formalized training even begins. Put simply, this course will help students master consulting and advisory skills.

Educational Objectives:

MCAS has the following key learning objectives:

1. To equip students with the tools, skills, frameworks, and mindsets to quickly add value by tackling business challenges in a structured, methodical, and logical manner.
2. To get students closer to mastery—to go beyond any prior consulting experience and firm trainings to prime them for differentiated impact in their organizations from Day 1.
3. To illustrate the core differences between the “operator” and “advisor” role, as well as the benefits and limits to each.
4. To assess and address the tasks, relationships, and dilemmas consultants may face.
5. To apply and practice many of the core skills that will make students more successful as counselors and advisors.

Grading / Course Administration:

Class participation, a series of assignments, and a final paper are the three evaluation methods used in MCAS.

Class participation will comprise 50% of the grade. Participation will be evaluated for both frequency and quality. Absences and lack of preparation will have a significantly negative impact on participation grades. Students will also be asked to submit thoughtful, relevant questions in advance of designated guest visits.

A series of three assignments will comprise another 25%. These assignments will be clearly specified as additional submissions on their Canvas page.

A final paper of roughly 1,500 words will comprise the remaining 25%.

Copyright © 2025 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Overview:

Modern Corporate Strategy examines how CEOs create value across businesses, geographies, and stages of the value chain in a world shaped by technological disruption and uncertainty. The course introduces frameworks for evaluating corporate scope, corporate advantage, and organizational design through three questions: How do firms create shareholder value across multiple markets? What are the limits to the scope of the firm? How can a multi-business corporation be managed effectively? The course moves beyond competitive positioning to examine corporate revitalization, business model change, and long-term value creation.

Career Focus:

Designed for students interested in general management, strategy, consulting, corporate development, private equity, investing, and senior leadership, the course takes the CEO’s perspective and develops skills for diagnosing portfolio choices, organizational design, and resource allocation in multi-business firms. It is cross-industry and relevant wherever leaders must decide what businesses to own, how to organize them, and how to renew corporate advantage.

Educational Objectives:

Students learn to articulate a corporate strategy in terms of objective, scope, and advantage; apply the “better-off” and “ownership” tests to diversification, vertical integration, geographic expansion, and M&A decisions; evaluate the role of corporate headquarters and organizational design in creating corporate advantage; and diagnose how firms revitalize the corporation by reshaping portfolio, organization, resources, and culture.

Course Content and Organization:

The course identifies three core elements that characterize any multi-market organization: the set of businesses in which it competes, the organizational design it employs, and the bundle of resources and capabilities it controls.

Module 1: Resources and the Continuum of Effective Corporate Strategy. The course is organized into three modules, beginning with an examination of the resources and capabilities that allow corporations to create value across businesses, geographies, and stages of the value chain. This module introduces the continuum of effective corporate strategy, from conglomerates and private equity firms to tightly related corporations and entrepreneurial ventures, and shows that successful corporate strategies must satisfy the same economic logic through the “better-off” and “ownership” tests. Students learn how to define a corporate strategy in terms of objective, scope, and corporate advantage, and how distinctive capabilities can serve as the “Mickey Mouse” that strengthens the portfolio. Through cases such as Danaher, Clorox, Silver Lake, and Davivienda, the module also examines how firms revitalize the corporation by building new resources and capabilities, especially in the context of digital transformation and long-term renewal.

Module 2: Scope: Businesses and Portfolio Transformation. This module focuses on the boundaries of the firm and on how leaders construct and reshape a portfolio that can create value over time. It addresses decisions about which businesses to enter or exit, how much vertical integration to pursue, when and how to expand geographically, and how to choose among internal development, partnerships, and acquisitions. Students evaluate scope choices in settings ranging from focused firms and large global organizations to younger growth companies, while considering how portfolio design must remain robust as technologies, competitors, and market conditions change. Drawing on cases such as Cadbury Schweppes, Sigma Foods, Arcos Dorados, Walmart’s response to Amazon, and Mondelez the module shows how changes in scope can become a powerful lever for revitalizing the corporation.

Module 3: Organization and the Role of Corporate Headquarters. The final module examines how a corporation’s structures, systems, and managerial processes must be designed to justify ownership and convert corporate strategy into superior performance. It studies the role of headquarters in shaping business-unit strategy, monitoring results, building centers of competence, sharing activities, delegating authority, allocating resources, and launching corporate initiatives. The module emphasizes the challenge of preserving entrepreneurship and adaptability while maintaining control, and of realigning resources, organization, and scope as competitive conditions evolve. Through cases including Maersk, Shell, and the FBI, students assess how senior leaders redesign the enterprise to sustain advantage, support transformation, and make the multi-business corporation work in practice.

Grading / Course Administration:

Assessment is based on 50% class participation and 50% final paper/project. Because the course is case-driven and discussion-intensive, regular attendance, careful preparation, and active contribution to class discussion are expected. The course is taught over 14 sessions.

Course Content Keywords:

corporate strategy, multi-business firms, mergers and acquisitions, diversification, corporate advantage, vertical integration, portfolio transformation, organization design, resource allocation, digital transformation

Overview:

This course uses works of literature from many countries – novels, plays, autobiography, and historical accounts, along with some background philosophy – to illuminate the moral and ethical challenges leaders face throughout their careers. Its goals are skill development, personal growth, and greater confidence in ethical decision making and action as a leader.

A former student described the aims of the course this way: “Morality is not something that can be switched on like a light when you assume a leadership role. Taking the time mentally to flex your morality muscle in the relative security of a classroom gives you a sense of your individual stance on moral issues before you are leading others and making moral judgments that affect more than just yourself. Ultimately, how we will each react in a morally challenging situation is something we won’t be able to predict until the moment comes, but this class is a step towards taking every possible preparation to ensure that when faced with a challenge we will have some experience to draw upon – even if it is through the lessons of our protagonists.”

Career Focus:

The course’s focus on preparing to live a morally responsible life as a leader has attracted and benefitted students from a wide range of backgrounds and career goals including finance, health care and biotech, entrepreneurship and venture funds, tech, global and in-country corporate management, real estate, and professional services.

Educational Objectives:

The primary goal of the course is to help students develop a well-considered, personal definition of moral leadership that they can apply in their professional, community, and personal lives. That requires answering four questions:

• What is the nature of a moral challenge?
• How do people “reason morally”?
• How do leaders contend with the moral choices they face?
• How is moral leadership different from leadership in general?

Course Content and Organization:

Readings are drawn from around the globe and span many centuries, from ancient Greece through the early Renaissance up to contemporary times. Each class features a core text (novel, play, autobiography, historical account) and a chapter from the course book, The Moral Leader: Challenges, Insights and Tools, that provides historical context, an introduction to the protagonist’s ethical challenges, author biographies, and other background. The course is organized into three modules:

• Moral Challenge, in which students explore fundamental moral problems protagonists face and the strategies they use to come to terms with them.
• Moral Reasoning, in which students examine the process, principles, and modes of analysis used by protagonists to make decisions with moral or ethical stakes.
• Moral Leadership, in which students examine situations where protagonists must make decisions and act under conditions of formal responsibility for others.

Grading / Course Administration:

The course meets in the afternoon block for a full two hours. Grading is based 60% on class participation and engagement and 40% on a final course paper.

Course Content Keywords:

Moral leadership; ethics; personal development; ethical challenges, moral decision-making, literature, philosophy, power

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved

Overview:

This course examines how managers can effectively motivate individuals and teams by designing incentive systems and organizational processes. Drawing on behavioral science and real-world case studies, students will apply practical, research-based frameworks to drive performance and improve their own effectiveness at work.

Career Focus:

This course gives students frameworks and tools for (i) understanding what motivates people, including themselves, and (ii) designing incentive systems, broadly defined, that motivate both individual performance and organizational outcomes. Students will learn to apply these concepts to motivate others toward value-creating goals and improve their own effectiveness at work. The course is useful for students in all career tracks and with any industry focus as it covers diverse cases across sectors, including investment banking, law, consulting, technology, non-profit organizations, the automotive industry, and professional sports. The cases span the organizational hierarchy, examining motivation challenges from frontline worker engagement to executive compensation, providing students with a comprehensive toolkit applicable across different organizational roles and at any career stage.

Educational Objectives:

By the end of the course, students will:

• Understand and apply key motivational frameworks to analyze and influence human behavior in an organizational context, including pay, perquisites, promotions, opportunities for skill development, social approval, fairness, stress, emotional states, autonomy, self-identity, and values

• Build and manage effective incentive systems, whether based on monetary compensation or other forms of rewards, that tap into people's underlying motivations and promote value-creating behavior

• Understand how an organization's incentive systems shape the mix of individuals who are attracted to, promoted within, and retained by the organization

• Know how to design organizational processes, such as hiring procedures and training programs, in ways that complement the organization's formal incentive systems

• Have the skills to evaluate and use digital tools and technologies (like AI and productivity trackers) to enhance employee motivation and individual productivity

• Apply course frameworks to enhance their own effectiveness at work

Course Content and Organization:

Throughout the course, students will apply a set of core frameworks for analyzing motivation and designing incentive systems. The course takes an interdisciplinary perspective and draws from behavioral science, the field that combines insights from economics and psychology to understand human decision making.

To establish a baseline from which the rest of the course builds, Module 1 explores the classical economic approach to analyzing organizational incentive systems and productivity. Using an extremely simple view of motivation, the economic approach provides many useful insights for getting things done and introduces foundational frameworks for analyzing and designing financial incentives. The key observation is that it is impossible to perfectly measure and therefore impossible to directly reward the value that is created by an individual on behalf of an organization or the individual themselves. When contending with this challenge, the designer of an incentive system—or someone trying to motivate themselves—faces an important tradeoff between inducing high levels of motivation and inducing the right types of behavior. All incentive systems represent different strategies for managing this tradeoff.

Module 2 challenges and expands the classical economic approach by considering a much richer perspective on what motivates people. Relying on a psychological lens, this module examines how both personal motivational strategies and organizational incentive systems should account for the relevance of non-monetary rewards, the social nature of the workplace, the emotions experienced in a work environment, and the role of meaning and purpose in shaping motivation. Students will explore how these psychological factors can cause well-intentioned incentive systems to backfire and shape individual decision-making. These psychological insights represent an opportunity for a skilled individual to harness a powerful set of motivators for getting things done, whether for motivating others or motivating themselves.

Module 3 synthesizes frameworks from earlier in the course and embeds them in the broader context of personal effectiveness and an organization's overall strategy. The module will analyze the interaction of formal incentive systems with other organizational processes and self-motivation techniques that may undermine or reinforce value-creating behavior. Special attention will be given to motivation challenges in remote and hybrid work environments, addressing how traditional motivation approaches must adapt to these increasingly common settings. Finally, students will have the opportunity to reflect on how their own personal values should interface with their approach when designing incentive systems to shape others' behavior and when developing strategies to motivate themselves.

Grading / Course Administration:

Students will have the option to either complete a group project or submit three individual reflection assignments (depending on course size and logistics).

Students will work in groups of four or five to prepare a presentation applying course frameworks to a frontier topic in the broad area of motivation. Examples include presenting a “mini-case” on a company that uses innovative incentive practices or employee motivation and productivity systems; reporting results from a laboratory-style experiment exploring a novel source of motivation; or synthesizing lessons learned from interviews with thought leaders in a relevant industry.

Students will be encouraged to incorporate both academic research findings and practical industry applications in their presentations, bridging theory and practice. The instructor will suggest several pre-approved topics from which students can choose, and students can also propose their own topics (subject to instructor approval and enough interest from other students to form a group). This project is not meant to be a full-fledged final course assignment, but instead a lighter-touch opportunity to explore an interesting idea in line with the course frameworks.

Reflection Option:

Alternatively, students may complete three short reflection assignments. These assignments are designed to deepen students’ ability to apply course frameworks to real-world managerial decisions. Reflections may ask students to (1) analyze past experiences through the lens of course concepts, (2) design or evaluate approaches to motivating individuals or teams in future managerial settings, and/or (3) examine and critically assess a real-world motivation or incentive system. Reflections should explicitly apply course frameworks and generate clear, actionable managerial insights.

Evaluation:

The components of the overall course grade are as follows: 50% based on class participation, 25% based on the group project or reflection assignments, and 25% based on a short multiple-choice exam at the end of the semester.

Course Content Keywords:

Leadership, Motivation, Incentives, Productivity, Performance Management, Organizational Behavior, Employee Engagement, Decision Making, Behavioral Economics, Compensation Design

Course Description:

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing how value is created and captured in the economy.

We're witnessing a paradigm shift: You have your direct labor, the work that you signed up to do for your employer or the work you do to build your own business. At the same time, your work generates data about your work, including your process, your expertise and your style. Your employees and mentees are also generating data about their work while on-the-job. In the era of AI, these data are valuable and in some instances, more valuable than the direct work itself. These data allow our capabilities to be recombined with other capabilities, enhanced over time, duplicated at little cost and potentially commoditized to destroy its uniqueness and value if unprotected. In light of this paradigm shift, the way we create and claim value in the labor market must also change.

This is a course that considers how you should navigate your career and develop and value your expertise. The lessons will be useful to anyone entering today’s labor market, entrepreneurs starting new ventures, and investors. Students will develop their strategy through labor economics frameworks, practice in the field codifying expertise along-side experts, as well as through exposure to guest speakers witnessing the labor market transition.

Learning Objectives:

To get a sense for the fundamental shift in navigating today’s labor market, consider the following public example of expertise codification: in Tom Hank’s film Here (2024), an AI model of Tom’s acting expertise based on past footage can be used to face-swap and age him such that Tom Hanks himself is no longer necessary in the filming process, and the film can capture Tom Hanks ages 18 to 80. Using similar technology, the emails, presentations and digital trail of your judgement on-the-job can be transformed into a model of your expertise that is disembodied, scaled, recombined and sold like an asset. How should you manage, price and negotiate over the data generated by your work? What will be different about the organization you join? What if instead, you find yourself the owner of data generated by people you employ? How should you use it to remain competitive? What are the legal, ethical and social implications of the choices you make? We will use theory and evidence from economics, law, and psychology to understand what your best strategy is, and to anticipate how the labor market and economy will be transformed by these negotiations in aggregate.

Using the lessons and frameworks we develop from examining the development of AI and data technologies we will examine individual choices you will need to make in an AI enabled world. These could include how you should use the technologies to codify your own expertise, how you should develop your expertise to increase the value of your codified asset, and how you should navigate employment contracts or other business agreements over your direct labor and any data byproduct that can be used to train AI models. We will also re-think the power of collective action in securing these rights in a changing environment. Throughout, students will develop a process for recognizing the elements that have, and have not, changed fundamentally in the era of information access and exploitation.

Career Focus:

This course is designed to help students consider how to develop and value their expertise in a world where cognitive skills that were exclusively embodied are, to some degree, being built into models that can be scaled and continue to learn.

Take-away Skills:

• Diagnose which components of a job are codifiable, and use this to assess the future value of that job

• Anticipate organizational responses to AI-driven expertise scaling

• Design a personal expertise-scaling strategy using AI tools, and begin to implement that strategy by constructing AI artifacts

• Evaluate the value of contracts involving data transfers and control rights over AI models and inputs

Faculty Expertise:

Prof Cullen is a leading labor economist whose research covers the impact of information and AI for firms, employees, and entrepreneurs. Prof Ghosh has been teaching courses on entrepreneurship and technology. He has built leading companies in the transition to the mobile and Internet economies. More recently he has been studying the development of AI and its likely social and business implications. Professors Cullen and Ghosh have designed this course to explore the implications of data and AI on the job market and offer practical insights to students who are entering the work force.

Structure:

The course is 5 modules with a mix of case and project-based learning exercises.

Module 1: What human expertise will be valued, and over what time horizon? We will study the case of Klarna, a successful FinTech company that cut employment by half as AI technologies were recently instituted across all functions. We will also consider One Digital, a consulting company aggressively developing and promoting "AI coworkers" in the workforce, a vision that many companies describe pursuing, whereby employees are empowered to train their AI coworker to do what they can do. We will consider how an MBA would and should navigate such a work environment to successfully create and claim value. We will place the adoption patterns we observe in historical context by examining past episodes of general purpose technologies. Our goal is to develop intuition for the timeline of adoption and the implications for our careers.

Module 2: How can you codify your own expertise to create and claim value. Students will be introduced to cutting edge tools to help them actively build out and scale their expertise, so that they enter the labor market as a team alongside their agents. To do this well, we will be formally examining what tasks within jobs can be automated, and the labor market implications for that role (salary, employment opportunities) given the set of tasks that can be carried out by AI and which remain for the person to carry out. To do this, we will look at the detailed jobs of professionals in Ontra as AI shaped legal business practices; we will also examine “Human in the Loop” companies that are actively codifying expertise across a range of professions to understand what they can, and cannot, capture effectively. Lastly we will try to expand our notion of the scope of our (codifiable and non-codifiable) expertise by examining the codification of relationship management in the context of Agile Agency, a talent agency for OnlyFans creators. The goal of these sessions is to set students up to carefully select what tasks of their own they want to codify, and to be able to evalue the trajectory of a job exposed to automation. On a practical note, this session will give students the tools necessary to start developing their final project: a set of generative AI artifacts and a career strategy to create and claim value in today's labor market.

Module 3: Conceptualizing how organizations and labor markets will evolve: much of society today is characterized by local unorganized knowledge, the particulars of a time and place and set of relationships that grant each individual a unique role and perspective (Hayek 1945). However, generative AI allows local information to be codified and processed much more readily, and also communicated more readily up a chain of command. This opens up the question of whether lower level employees can and should have more authority to make decisions (they can process more information and access AI models of decision-making), or, if alternatively the technology can and should be used to transmit local information to higher level employees for centralized decision-making, potentially diminishing the role for lower-level employees altogether. If AI technology facilitates matching problems with solutions directly (Garicano, 2000) indeed we may witness an accelerated transition toward independent contracting as witnessed in Hollywood, where many labor outputs are codified already (exist in physical form, eg. script, footage). We will examine the causes and consequences of organizational change in the context of Shopify and Blue Cross Blue Shield.

Module 4: Negotiated value: From our frameworks we learn that professionals' leverage depends on the degree to which their expertise is replicable and substitutable, and their ability to coordinate negotiations. We examine two creative industries with different structures and consequentially, different negotiated creator rights: the music industry and Hollywood film. By examining the music industry and Hollywood, we learn how institutions and contracts negotiated fundamentally shift the incentives to create value using AI and who can extract value from the productivity gains. The future development of valuable expertise could hinge on these negotiated rights. We will be joined by the Chief Negotiator of the Hollywood Writers’ Guild to explore the tactics for negotiating rights and value.

Module 5: The reality of today’s job market: We will bring together a panel of employers and recent alumni in the labor market to discuss the process of recruiting, interviewing and selling expertise in AI forward contexts. We will address the following questions: What is does the requirement of AI proficiency mean in practice? What does it mean to arrive to a job with a team of your own agents to deploy? How can one gracefully leverage AI proficiency and pre-codified expertise and agents to negotiate better roles and compensation? How has the use of AI in interviewing and preparing materials changed labor market signals and tactics?

Course Resources:

Zoe Cullen – zcullen@hbs.edu

Shikhar Ghosh – sghosh@hbs.edu

Wanda Perez – wperez@hbs.edu (Faculty Assistant to Prof. Ghosh)

Kalkidan Tadesse– ktadesse@hbs.edu (Faculty Assistant to Prof. Cullen)

Evaluation:

Participation in class discussions: 50%

Final Project: 50%

Digital clones or agents that codify your capabilities, and a roadmap for further development

Resume or company description that includes how you can scale your expertise

Terms on which you are willing to offer your expertise

Overview:

Managerial, executive, and entrepreneurial success requires the ability to negotiate. Whether you are forging an agreement with suppliers, trying to ink a deal with potential customers, raising money from investors, managing a conflict inside the firm, or tackling a dispute that is headed towards litigation, your ability to negotiate will affect your performance. This course will teach you how to analyze, prepare for, and execute negotiations at a sophisticated level, through actions both at and away from the bargaining table. It will give you the opportunity to enhance your strengths as a negotiator and to shore up your weaknesses. Please see the sample syllabus.

Career Focus:

Negotiation skills are essential in all careers and all industries. Students who are pursuing careers in entrepreneurship, private equity, venture capital, product management (and technology management more generally), supply chain management, consulting, and general management will find the course highly valuable. Students will also find the course helpful as they negotiate job offers.

Educational Objectives:

This course will enable you to become a more effective negotiator by teaching you how to:

• Design and execute agreements that create maximum value on a sustainable basis;
• Capture an appropriate share of the value that is created;
• Achieve superior results in a vast array of competitive environments, including those that entail uncertainty, complex issues, intense pressure from competitors, negotiating from a position of weakness, negotiating in multi-party environments, and negotiating under the threat of litigation;
• Resolve disputes and achieve desired outcomes even when others are becoming emotional or appear irrational;
• Think strategically in competitive contexts (e.g., bidding wars) by anticipating the strategy of others;
• Understand the vital role of ethics in negotiation;
• Work with people whose backgrounds, expectations, perspectives, and values differ from yours.

At its core, the course is designed to help you audit and refine your negotiation skills, and to provide an opportunity for you to develop a negotiator’s lens for diagnosing and resolving business (and non-business) problems.

Course Content and Organization:

You will engage in a large number of (increasingly complex) negotiation simulations, receive feedback on your strategies and performance, debate alternative approaches, and work with classmates to discover new insights. The course will allow you to test your analytic ability and your tactical skills, and to experiment with new ideas. This approach allows us to:

• Introduce a negotiation framework that will help you analyze, prepare for, and execute negotiations more systematically—and hence, more effectively—in a wide variety of contexts;
• Build a negotiation toolkit that consists of strategies and tactics for creating and capturing value in negotiation, and which can be put to use as soon as you walk out the door;
• Create an environment that helps diagnose your individual needs, and allows you to identify techniques for mitigating your weaknesses and leveraging your strengths.

The exact sequence of modules and sessions varies across sections, but a typical sequence begins by establishing the fundamental analytical framework; continues by delving into the details of negotiator behavior and psychology, drawing implications for negotiation tactics; proceeds to consider how strategy must adapt to complex, multi-party environments; and concludes by synthesizing lessons from the course.

Grading / Course Administration:

Active class participation in the negotiation exercises, debriefs, and case discussions is essential for success in the course. All sections of the course place significant weight on class participation in the calculation of grades.

Most sections of the course feature a final exam. Prof. Goldenberg’s sections feature a series of brief quizzes instead of a final exam.

Several sections of the course also require one or a handful of brief written assignments.

The exact weights for the various components of the overall course grade differ across sections.

Course Content Keywords:

entrepreneurship, private equity, venture capital, product management, technology management, supply chain management, consulting, general management, job offers

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved

Requirements: active, insightful class and short paper assignment(s); major paper or take-home final exam.

Revised: no formal pre-requisite or co-requisite: there is no formal pre- or co-requisite, although an introductory negotiation course at one of Harvard’s professional schools or equivalent elsewhere will enhance its value—as will extensive practical negotiating experience. Those without prior negotiation coursework should read 3D Negotiation by Lax and Sebenius before class begins to become familiar with key concepts and terminology.

Purpose:

Take your negotiating ability to the next level by matching wits with some of the world’s greatest diplomats as they work through their toughest deals. Examples: former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker takes on the challenge of unifying East and West Germany within NATO toward the end of the Cold War; Christiana Figueres guides the Paris climate talks to a near-unanimous agreement in 2015; Colombian President Juan Santos ends a 50-year civil war with the FARC guerillas; US Trade Negotiator Charlene Barshefsky takes on IP negotiations with China; former US Secretaries of State Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Hillary Clinton describe critical moments in their negotiations with Vladimir Putin, etc.

A typical case challenges you to address critical deal moments. For many cases in the course, we watch stop a video interview, mostly that I’ve conducted with the protagonist(s) describing how they handled key decisions. After discussion of each such decision, we move to the next critical moment, and so on . . . after which we draw broader lessons about effective negotiation. We often find that insights from private sector dealmaking inform public and not-for-profit sector negotiations and vice versa.

The objective of this approach is to extract highly practical lessons from studying the world’s greatest negotiators at work on their most challenging deals—in business, finance, diplomacy, the not-for-profit world, and across sectors. Since 2001, the Program on Negotiation—an interuniversity consortium involving Harvard, MIT, and Tufts—has regularly bestowed the “Great Negotiator Award” on men and women from around the world who have consistently overcome formidable barriers to achieve truly worthwhile purposes. In a closely related project at Harvard, faculty have conducted detailed interviews with former American Secretaries of State—Henry Kissinger, George Shultz James A. Baker, III, Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and Rex Tillerson—about their most difficult negotiations. As chair of the Great Negotiators Award program and co-chair of the American Secretaries of State initiative, I am deeply involved in a multi-year project to systematically distill the strategies and tactics of this distinguished group (along with several other remarkable negotiators). The emerging findings of this ongoing project will heavily inform this course. By way of highly interactive case discussions, frequently interspersed with video clips of the protagonists, Negotiation and Diplomacy will develop valuable lessons and skills for dealmaking and dispute resolution that go well beyond those offered in introductory courses. 

Career Focus:

This course is designed for students who are interested in negotiation and diplomacy; more specifically, those who expect to analyze, be affected by, and/or participate effectively in challenging diplomatic and not-for-profit negotiations, often with public-private and cross-border aspects.

Course Content and Organization:

What can we learn from studying highly skilled diplomats grappling with some of the world’s most challenging problems? This course explores how modern diplomacy and negotiation can effectively address seemingly “intractable” international conflicts and overcome barriers to agreement in civil wars, interstate conflicts, environmental challenges, as well as in trade and finance. Drawing on in-depth cases in national and global contexts, the course will develop diagnostic and prescriptive characteristics of effective negotiation and diplomacy as tools of political, military, economic, environmental and financial statecraft.

The course will pay close attention to the “how” and the skills of effective negotiation and diplomacy. How are negotiation and diplomacy conducted at the highest levels both at and away from the conference table? How can leaders use negotiations and the combination of diplomacy and other sources of leverage (sanctions, coalitions, the threat of force, etc.) to achieve their objectives? How do global and business leaders most effectively overcome daunting barriers to a desired agreements? In service of these objectives, the course will draw on case studies of some of recent history’s greatest negotiators both playing official and unofficial roles, look at in-depth, personal interviews from the instructors’ American Secretaries of State Project, in which we have already spent considerable time with nine former US Secretaries of State focused on their toughest negotiations (and plan to have at least one more such interview (with former Secretary of State Tony Blinken before the course is projected to start in fall 2026. In order to extract best practices and common mistakes, we will study examples where negotiation and diplomacy paid off and where they failed.

Prior course modules have included Introduction, Kissinger on Negotiation, Ethnic/Religious Conflicts, Great Power Diplomacy, Rivalry: the U.S., China, and Global Power, as well as Middle Power and Environmental Diplomacy.

Course Requirements:

Beyond constructive participation in class and faithfully preparing for and carrying out negotiation exercises, most students will opt for a self-scheduled written exam. Instead of taking a final exam, some students may prefer to write a paper on the kind of negotiation about which you care intensely or about a “great diplomatic negotiator” whom you wish to study in depth. Since, inevitably, the class sessions won’t cover your specific areas of greatest interest in the kind of depth you might wish, the paper option provides the chance to do so for yourself and to build personally relevant intellectual capital. The major criterion for the paper is that it treats your topic in a sophisticated manner from a negotiation-analytic standpoint, and that it teaches you and the faculty something significant about effective negotiation and diplomacy.

Overview:

This course explores the power of ownership in shaping company success, as well as how to be an effective owner of a company.

Ownership is arguably the most powerful force in business. It shapes which companies rise and fall, as well who benefits from those companies that succeed. We tend to view companies from the vantage point of the widely held public company, where executives rule and owners exercise influence mainly by buying/selling shares, or occasional activist interventions. As a result, the impact of ownership is largely ignored. In reality, the vast majority of the world’s companies are privately held, or they are publicly traded but controlled by founders (e.g., Google, Facebook), families (e.g., Ford), governments (e.g., Airbus), or charities (e.g., Novo Nordisk). In all these cases, a relatively small number of owners exercise ultimate control over decision-making. In the process, they shape almost everything of importance about those companies.

We will explore the power that accompanies ownership through three main lenses:

1. Ownership as an influence on company behavior. How does ownership guide how companies define success? How does ownership shape competitive advantage and affect company survival?
2. Ownership as a choice. What are the potential models of ownership? What are the career possibilities in different ownership models? When should companies consider changing models? As a founder, how should you think about ownership?
3. Ownership as a skillset? What is the difference between management and ownership? What makes someone effective at ownership? How do you prepare to be an effective owner?

By understanding these dynamics, students will be able to build long-term, sustainable strategies that account for the strengths/weaknesses that are built into both their companies as well as those of their competitors. Many of you will work for companies that are not widely held by the public, and virtually all of you will compete against such companies. For those who plan to start a company and want it to last beyond your leadership, you will need to consider whose hands to leave it in after your departure. The course may also open up career pathways you hadn’t considered, or influence how you think about your planned entrepreneurial venture.

Career Focus:

This course is designed to be broadly relevant to students, since ownership is a dimension that shows up in virtually every setting. A deeper understanding of ownership will help you make better decisions about your career as well as in your role as an organizational leader. It will have particular relevance for those who plan to be a company owner, as an entrepreneur, executive, and/or investor.

Educational Objectives:

The main objectives of the course are to:

• Explore the wide world of ownership models and how they differ from each other, including: charity, cooperative/mutual, employee, family, founder, and government. We will also consider “hybrid” companies that are publicly traded but controlled by a founder, foundation, or family
• See how ownership profoundly shapes how companies compete
• Treat ownership as a choice – both for a company and for you as an entrepreneur/leader
• Develop the distinctive skillset of an owner (vs. a manager)

The key questions we will explore are:

• In what ways does the ownership of a company affect how it competes?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of different ownership models?
• When is it time to change a company’s ownership model (e.g., going from private to public or vice versa)?
• What does it take to be good at ownership (vs. management)?

Course Content and Organization:

The course is divided into three main modules:

1. Competition. This module focused on how ownership influences company strategy and decision-making. The objectives of most companies are far more complex than a focus on maximizing shareholder value. Students will learn a methodology for assessing and articulating more complex owner goals. Ownership shapes both the resources that companies have access to (human, financial, and social capital) as well as how they allocate those resources to create advantage. Ownership models can be seen as solutions to specific strategic problems, such as scaling a business or sustaining a culture. We will explore the competitive advantages and disadvantages of different ownership models, how companies can use ownership as a competitive weapon, and how to predict what companies will do based on who owns them. For many companies, longevity is a critical part of how they define success. We will examine why once-prosperous companies fail and the ways in which ownership influences corporate mortality.
2. Choice. We will explore how a shift in ownership model (e.g., going from public to private) can be a tool for changing a company’s trajectory. We will also consider the “Founder’s Final Act,” which is the choice that a founder makes about where to locate ownership when they leave the business. That choice will have a profound impact on the company’s future path.
3. Capability. Ownership is a skill that can be learned and is distinct from management. Many students will be owners of a company at some points in their lives. We will investigate what it means to be effective at ownership, learning from the owners of sports teams, owner-operators, and minority investors.

Each session will involve a case discussion. Some of the cases will be of the standard variety and some will be “live cases” where company leaders and/or owners will be integrated throughout the session. A number of cases will include guest speakers from the company.

Cases for the Spring 2026 course, with guest speakers where noted, were:

• John Lewis Partnership
• Newman’s Own. Guest Speaker: Alex Amouyel, President and CEO of Newman’s own Foundation
• Vanguard. Guest Speaker: Cara McCutcheon, Principal and Head of Private Client
• Patagonia. Guest Speaker: Charles Conn, Board Chair
• Wegmans. Guest Speaker: Colleen Wegman, CEO, 4^th generation family member
• Pal’s Sudden Service
• Tribal Councils Investment Group of Manitoba. Guest Speakers: Heather Berthelette, CEO, and Chief Dennis Meeches, President
• Goldman Sachs
• Dell Technologies. Guest Speaker: Steve Felice, Former President and Chief Commercial Officer of Dell
• Oakland Athletics. Guest Speaker: John Fisher, Principal Owner
• New Balance. Guest Speaker: Chris Davis, Chief Marketing Officer, Brand President, and 2nd generation family member
• BDT&MSD. Guest Speakers: Byron Trott, Founder, and Ashish Lal, Partner

Grading / Course Administration:

Students will be graded based on engagement in class and either a final exam or a final paper. In the exam/paper, students will apply the lessons from the course to a company, including the ways in which a company’s ownership has shaped its strategic choices, how ownership has been a source of competitive advantage/disadvantage, and what they see as the primary strategic issues/options for that company in the future.

Course Content Keywords:

Founder, ETA/search, family business, activist investor, employee ownership, charitable ownership

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved

Overview:

Every business decision takes place within an ownership structure. The ownership structure of a firm, a resource, or an entire industry shapes how capital gets allocated, how risk is distributed, and whose interests count. Yet business leaders rarely question the ownership structure they've inherited or the range of arrangements from which to choose. Ownership by Design (OBD) starts from the proposition that these arrangements are not given. They are the result of design choices. They can be redesigned, and the range of possibilities is limited only by our imagination.

Module 1 (Enterprise Ownership) opens the course by examining businesses where leaders have made or are making intentional choices about how the ownership of the enterprise is structured. We examine public companies, private equity portfolio companies, startups, trust-owned firms, and employee-owned firms to gain an understanding of how these choices are made, how they drive organizational performance, how they are financed, and how they impact the firm’s stakeholders.

In Module 2 (Resource Ownership), we explore how property rights to resources are determined, allocated, and managed. The topic is particularly salient now given international conflict, changes in global trade, and advancements in extraction technology. We examine ownership models to address housing prices and shortages, distributed ownership of a publicly traded gold mine in Zimbabwe, and how to determine ownership of resources in outer space.

Finally, in Module 3 (Industry and Society), we examine the interaction of new technologies and existing ownership structures on the performance and functioning of specific industries. We explore the impact of ownership models on news media, the challenge posed by AI for musicians, actors, and artists, and how technologies and ownership models create new opportunities.

Many of the cases we'll study are unfolding in real time, and guest practitioners leading this work will join us throughout the semester.

Career Focus:

Ownership by Design is a course for students interested in careers in private equity, entrepreneurship through acquisition, general investment, human resources, consulting, and general management. The course is also intended for founders considering ownership structures at the start and on exit, as well as students pursuing careers in the public sector that involve questions about structuring ownership (e.g., community development). Specific topics in the course will be of interest to students with a sector-specific focus (e.g., real estate, the space economy, news media, music).

Educational Objectives:

This course equips students to analyze ownership not as a background condition of business but as a crucial design variable, one that shapes strategy, governance, incentive structures, and the distribution of economic value. Students will develop frameworks for evaluating how different ownership structures create distinct operational logistics, risk profiles, and stakeholder dynamics. They will learn to identify the trade-offs embedded in ownership choices across firm types, asset classes, and jurisdictions, and to recognize moments when ownership design becomes a source of competitive advantage or systemic vulnerability. Students also will gain insight from practitioners on the challenges and opportunities of putting these understandings into practice.

Course Content and Organization:

Module 1 (Enterprise Ownership) examines how founders, boards, and investors structure ownership to align incentives, attract capital, and allocate control. Exploring a variety of firms across industries and ownership structures, students will evaluate how ownership choices affect capital allocation, time horizons, executive decision-making, and outcomes for employees, communities, and investors. The module also considers newer and less conventional structures, including employee-, trust-, and foundation-owned firms, that decouple ownership from individual wealth accumulation and raise questions about what ownership is ultimately for.

Key themes and questions for the module include:

• What are the relevant dimensions and tradeoffs along which to compare and evaluate different enterprise ownership structures?

• In what ways do existing financing models, legal constraints, and government policies favor one enterprise ownership structure over another?

• How might these financing models and background considerations be modified and developed to support a broader range of enterprise ownership structures?

• Can the stakeholder-shareholder theory debate be circumvented by considering who should participate in the ownership of enterprises?

Module 2 (Resource Ownership) broadens the lens from firms to the assets and inputs that underpin economic activity. Who owns critical minerals, wireless spectrum, water rights, and orbital slots, and on what legal and institutional basis? Students will examine how property rights regimes for natural and strategic resources are established, contested, and renegotiated, particularly as supply chains shift, trade policy evolves, and new frontiers (including outer space) raise novel questions about jurisdiction and access. The module draws on economic history, international law, and contemporary policy debates to help students understand how resource ownership structures shape market power, national competitiveness, and long-run economic development.

Key themes and questions for the module include:

• How did existing resource ownership structures come into being and what are the arguments for or against them?

• How should resource ownership structures be applied or modified for new frontiers of ownership, including outer space?

• What sorts of ownership structures are required for the efficient management and use of vital resources?

Module 3: (Industry and Society) builds on the previous two modules by extending questions of resource ownership to new frontiers evolving in the digital space, including data ownership and ownership of AI-generated work. For this analysis, the module focuses on the interaction of new technologies and existing ownership structures on the performance and functioning of specific industries. We explore the impact of ownership models on news media, the challenge posed by AI for musicians, actors, and artists, and how technologies and ownership models create new opportunities.

Key themes and questions for the module include:

• Using the case of news media, how well do existing enterprise ownership structures enable the functioning of an industry and are there innovations in ownership that better support its functioning?

• In an increasingly digital economy and with the rise of AI, how should ownership be conceived and specified and to what extent is human authorship and ownership valuable and relevant?

• Looking ahead, what opportunities are created by new technologies in conjunction with ownership structures?

Grading / Course Administration:

The course’s main deliverable will be a project – either individual or group at each student’s preference – that examines an aspect of ownership in the modern economy; either one discussed during the course or one that is connected to the student’s career goals. The professors will work with students to identify topics and collaborators that are of interest to each student.

Grading will be determined by class participation (50%) and the final project (50%).

Course Content Keywords:

Ownership, private equity, investment management, leadership, incentives, employee management, entrepreneurship through acquisition, general management, property rights, stakeholder theory, capitalism, digital, AI, governance

Overview

This is an advanced corporate finance course focused on private equity (PE) investing. The course offers a deep dive into growth equity and buyouts, also touching on closely related investing strategies such as secondaries, distress and private debt. Students will examine a wide variety of investment settings: from lower middle market companies to mega-cap, from the United States to emerging markets, from buy-and-build situations to turnarounds to mature businesses, from “home-run” deals to troubled investments. (The course does not cover venture capital or real estate segments of PE.)

Through these case studies, the goal of the class is to understand when and how private equity investors consistently add value: what are the persistent and repeatable sources of risk-adjusted excess returns in the private equity space, what skills and institutional features enable that success, and what opportunities and challenges are presented by recent developments in the PE industry.

Students will gain exposure to a set of practical skills including deal assessment and due diligence, valuation, deal execution, capital structure, governance, change management, and setting incentives. In addition, a substantial part of the course will be spent on strategic elements of deal making.

Career Focus

The course is intended for students who are interested in working for a private equity firm, leading a private-equity owned operating company, investing in private equity as limited partners, or providing advisory services to private equity firms. This course is also appropriate for all students who are interested in a detailed and rigorous exploration of corporate finance, as many of the decisions taken by PE firms have a direct parallel to the strategic and financial decisions taken by companies more broadly and by other types of investors. The majority of cases will integrate these topics from a PE investor’s perspective. Case protagonists will attend many of the classes as guests.

Educational Objectives

This course has two objectives. First, it builds a rigorous approach and toolkit for sourcing, analyzing, negotiating, structuring and managing investments. The second goal of the course is to provide students with a deep understanding of the private equity industry in a broad sense: its common tools, strategies, impact, and factors that have been affecting its evolution.

Course Content and Organization

The course has 28 sessions, followed by a final exam. The course is organized into five modules.

• Module 1: Deal Sourcing and Valuation

This module will explore various strategies employed by private equity firms to identify and evaluate investment opportunities. Students will be expected to articulate clear, compelling and differentiated investment theses. Important tools for evaluating investments – including LBO investment return models, returns bridges, financial statement analysis, and broader due diligence questions – will be examined.

• Module 2: Deal Execution

This module highlights the critical levers utilized by private equity investors in structuring transactions, examining how funding choices enable or impede strategic and financial success, while increasing or mitigating risk. Capital structure, security choice, alignment of incentives, and broader capital markets issues will be central to the cases in this module. A detailed exploration of the structure and functioning of credit markets and their central role in private equity transactions will be highlighted.

• Module 3: Deal Management

This module explores the important choices that private equity firms make after closure of the transactions. In particular, the critical operational levers that drive value creation will be examined, as well as governance, board effectiveness and impact, and debt management. The interaction between investor and portfolio-company operating executives will be examined from multiple perspectives.

• Module 4: Realizations

This module examines timing of the exit and highlights the critical mechanisms for realizing value. A variety of realizations will be presented, including strategic and financial sales of portfolio companies, initial public offerings, and secondary transactions.

• Module 5: Private Equity Firm Strategic and Management Issues

This final module takes a step back from deal-level analyses and looks at the organizational and strategic issues of private equity organizations. The goal is to understand why firms succeed consistently and which practices are likely to deliver sustained profitability in the future, and also to reflect on LPs pressures and needs.

Grading / Course Administration

Students are expected to be active participants in class discussion, offering a variety of quantitative and qualitative insights that contribute to the assessment of each day’s decision.

Class participation and the final exam each count for 50% of the course grade. Some cases include assigned exercises/submissions, typically due before class, which count towards the participation component of the course grade.

Course Content Keywords: Private equity, Investing, Strategy, Corporate finance, Financial analysis, Mergers & acquisitions, Corporate governance, Capital structure

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Overview:

In this half course, students take the perspective of a Product Manager at a technology company tasked with improving and growing an existing product. Through case studies, exercises, assigned readings, and conversations with product leaders, students examine a variety of management opportunities and challenges related to building and growing technology products, and practice applying key product strategies to real situations faced by PMs at leading tech companies. Over the term, these tradeoffs are illustrated through examples drawn from a wide range of technology products, with a primary emphasis on consumer-facing software in the internet, mobile, and marketplace sectors.

This course is taught by a former Google product executive focused on bringing real-world situations into the classroom. To support this, a product leader joins each class and is woven into the discussion, enabling candid conversations about building and scaling products and product organizations. Past guests have included Chief Product Officers and Senior VPs of Product at Amazon, Microsoft, YouTube, Netflix, Uber, Walmart, Spotify, Instacart, Superhuman, Duolingo, and Calm.

No prior background in product management, design, engineering, or computer science is required, and students considering career transitions are especially encouraged to enroll.

Career Focus:

This course is especially relevant for students who plan to be Product Managers, are broadly interested in Product Management, and those who seek to join larger Technology companies following graduation. It is also relevant to aspiring founders who seek to better understand the decisions and tradeoffs involved in growing a product after achieving product-market fit.

Educational Objectives:

A Product Manager is deeply focused on the problem their product aims to solve, working to define its functional requirements while leading cross-functional teams to develop, launch, and continuously improve it over time. As PMs advance within larger organizations, they increasingly face tradeoffs around which problems matter most and which solutions are worth pursuing. These decisions rarely have clear right answers, making the ability to navigate complex tradeoffs and exercise strong judgment critically important skills. 

This course aims to provide an introduction to product management and expose students to key product development and growth strategies so they can build, optimize, and scale products following graduation. It also introduces students to several important product tradeoffs that arise at key points along a product’s growth trajectory.

Please note that this course does not focus on the end-to-end product development process from initial problem identification through product launch, nor how to find early product market fit. These topics are covered by other HBS courses.

Course Content and Organization:

Across large B2C technology companies, PM roles tend to center on three broad types of work: improving the core product, enhancing the product by launching new features, and pursuing adjacent opportunities for growth. While the specific scope of a PM’s role may vary by company, team, and seniority level, these three categories capture many of the most important challenges and opportunities PMs are asked to solve and pursue. Moreover, when combined they reflect the range of responsibilities PMs take on as they seek to create customer value, drive business results, and shape product strategy.

Module 1: Improving Core Products

Improving existing product experiences is one of the most common responsibilities for PMs at large technology companies. It is also often one of the fastest paths to growth, given an established user base. This work typically focuses on removing friction in key user journeys and improving conversion and retention. It involves understanding customer pain points, analyzing user behavior, identifying opportunities for improvement, and working cross-functionally to drive measurable impact. In class, we explore questions such as: How do you improve a user experience? How do you understand the user journey? How do you optimize a conversion funnel? How do you win back churned customers?

Module 2: Adding New Features

Another frequent responsibility of PMs is to enhance existing products by introducing new features. This work is important because new features can deepen engagement, unlock new revenue streams, attract new users, and help a product evolve alongside changing customer needs. PMs tasked with developing new features must decide what to build, why it matters, how it fits into the broader product vision, and how it should be launched, monetized, and measured. In class, we explore questions such as: How do you define success? How do you prioritize new features? How do you grow an audience?

Module 3: Monetization Strategy

Monetization strategy is increasingly considered an important PM responsibility as companies seek sustainable profitability and competitive advantage. At larger technology companies, this often involves choosing among different business models while balancing revenue goals with user experience. PMs must also determine how monetization is introduced, scaled, and optimized over time. In class, we explore questions such as: How do you choose a monetization strategy?  How do you price a new feature? How do you approach go-to-market and advertiser or partner selection? How do you scale monetization while maintaining strong user experience and appropriate guardrails?

Module 4: Pursuing Adjacent Products for Growth

As products and companies mature, PMs are often asked to look beyond the core product and identify new avenues for growth. At larger tech companies, this may involve exploring adjacent customer needs, responding to competitive threats, or deciding whether a new opportunity should be built within the core product or launched separately. This type of work is particularly important in more senior PM roles, as it requires strategic judgment, careful resource allocation and often has a large opportunity cost. In class, we explore questions such as: How do you balance investment in the core versus adjacent opportunities? How do you respond to a competitor’s product offering? When do you spin out a product? How do you scope a Minimum Viable Product?

Grading / Course Administration:

• Class participation (50%): This includes attendance as well as both frequency and quality of in-class participation. Participation will be evaluated first on quality, then on frequency. 

• Pre-class Exercises (30%). These exercises are a chance to apply what you are learning to real product examples and situations. No late exercises will be accepted. Individual contribution only. 

• Final project (20%). Students will identify a meaningful problem or opportunity for a product they know well and develop a thoughtful product proposal to address it. ~1500 word paper.

Course Content Keywords:

“product management”, “product growth”, “Tech”, “product development”

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved

Overview:

This is a course about building for government in private startups and inside governments themselves. We wrestle with the question of if (and how) entrepreneurial techniques can be brought to bear on some of the toughest problems and at some of the largest scale. Through a mix of mainly cases-based discussion, and also some hands-on sessions, we meet many private govtech founders who are building products and services to solve public problems as well as public officials – mayors, ministers, innovation officers and the like – sometimes buying these new tools or making their own.

Career Focus:

This course is designed for students who may found, join, or fund private startup companies that sell to (or around) governments to solve giant problems or who may want to become extreme innovators inside government at some point themselves. The cases feature a broad range of contemporary technology applications, and the course may be of particular interest to students curious about AI (especially), autonomy, blockchain, sensors, crowdsourcing, platforms, and related topics. The course also tackles career questions for students who wonder how to spend time making a difference in both the private and public sectors.

Educational Objectives:

Students will know:

• Barriers and remedies for sourcing new ideas to solve old and new public problems

• Sources of risk aversion in governments and ways for addressing

• Size and nature of government markets for technology related tools

• Economics of govtech and related businesses, their sales cycles and more

• Factors that drive scale in public products and programs, including network effects

• AI use cases in and for governments as well as examples of other technology applications

Students will know how to:

• Source new ideas for solving public problems from a range of sources (data, the crowd, action, etc.)

• Adapt and apply entrepreneurial techniques (lean startup, hypothesis-driven entrepreneurship, etc.) for the public realm, adjusted for the obstacles presented by experimenting in public.

• Sell to government customers, leveraging knowledge of the three buyer journeys that make up government buying.

• Architect platforms and “government as a platform” for achieving scaled impact.

• Distinguish between “possibility” (the trying of new things that probabilistically may not work) and “delusion” (pursuing efforts that are wasteful, distracting, or worse).

Students will know how to be:

• Oriented toward action when it comes to solving public problems and resolving uncertainty.

• Effective at communicating the risks in the status quo.

• Ambitious govtech founders.

• Successful investors in govtech and related businesses.

• “Possibility leaders” broadly.

Course Content and Organization:

Four modules make up the bulk of the course.

Ideas. What should public entrepreneurs work on? We tackle “problem-finding” and “solution-finding”. We touch on customer discovery to understand needs of citizens and public workers. We meet entrepreneurs who used the tools of design thinking and explore how they can be adapted for public problems.

Risk. How can public leaders and their private partners take on riskier projects? And how do we navigate obstacles to that? We consider whether lean startup techniques can be applied to these efforts.

Opportunity. How can businesses bring new products and services to the public? We look at ways of choosing channels, customers, and modes of revenue-generation. We weigh selling to governments or selling around them. We also look at raising capital for these business models and investing in them.

Scale. We ask how do private and public leaders bring these efforts to transformative levels? We look at the idea of government as a platform and ways to leverage their network effects for growth.

We tackle these topics mostly through case discussion, and we spend time with many guests. The cases roughly feature 50% private company founders and 50% public officials. The settings are roughly 60% US and 40% non-US.

Grading / Course Administration:

60% class engagement / 40% final exam.

Course Content Keywords:

Public entrepreneurship, startups, founding, government, innovation, govtech, defensetech, artificial intelligence, technology

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved

Career Focus

Real estate sits at the intersection of finance, operations, law, and human behavior – and rewards those who can act decisively when the facts are incomplete and the stakes are real. This course is designed for students who intend to pursue careers as investors, fund managers, or deal-makers at private equity firms, family offices, REITs, and operating companies – and who want to develop the judgment to make consequential investment decisions, not just analyze them.

Educational Objectives

Students will learn how capital structures, asset characteristics, market forces, legal frameworks, and stakeholder incentives shape investment outcomes – always from the perspective of someone who has to decide. The goal is not to survey the real estate landscape but to build the sourcing instinct, underwriting discipline, and negotiating skill that practitioners develop over years in the field.

Content and Organization

The course is organized into three modules:

Deal-Making Fundamentals – Students engage immediately with real investment decisions, analyzing transactions across asset classes – residential, industrial, office and retail – and building the analytical and deal-structuring skills needed to evaluate and pursue them.

Stakeholder Motivations – Every transaction involves parties with different incentives, legal constraints, and objectives. This module develops a sharper feel for how deals are won, lost, and reshaped through human behavior – and how to structure, price, and negotiate with full awareness of whose interests are and are not aligned. A structured negotiation game simulates competitive deal dynamics under realistic constraints.

Success and Failure – The final module is run in investment committee format. Students evaluate live transactions, real fund materials, and complete investment memos, making and defending recommendations under uncertainty. The emphasis is on the pattern recognition and decision discipline that distinguish successful investors – studied through both deals that worked and mistakes that were avoidable.

Pedagogical Mix

The case method is central throughout: every session is organized around a real investment decision, with active participation expected. Most sessions feature the actual protagonist of the case or a senior industry practitioner – including current and former investors and fund managers whose firsthand experience enriches the discussion and accelerates the development of practitioner-grade judgment. Most assignments are completed in study groups. The course concludes with a final exam.

Course Content Keywords: Private equity, Real estate, Real assets, Finance, Investment, Investor, Investing, Deal making, Development, Infrastructure

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Course Overview

This course is intended to provide a framework for analyzing private investments to make investments. Specifically, we cover topics pertaining to investing, managing, and developing investments in real estate and private asset backed companies. The course will be divided into three modules. The first module focuses on portfolio construction and understanding investment risks associated with private investments. The second module consists of the analysis of specific transactions with an emphasis on whether to pursue a specific transaction or not based on its investment merits. This section of the course is run as an investment committee, meaning that students must defend their decision as to whether or not to make a commitment. We focus on the attributes of both successful and many unsuccessful transactions. The final module consists of a focus on private investment firms, their compensation structures and how they impact behavior. For the final project students will be asked to develop an investment concept and present it via a paper and investment proposal.

The course guests have historically included some of the leading private investors in the world, including Howard Marks, Barry Sternlicht, John Grayken, Ken Caplan, Mike Fascitelli, among many others.

Career Focus

This course is intended for any student interested in a career in private market investing. Also, it provides a framework for those interested in understanding how to make private investments for their own accounts.

Educational Objectives

1. How to construct a private investment portfolio

2. How to assess the risks and returns in private investments and real estate portfolios

3. How to perform relative value analyses of differing investments

4. How to manage troubled investments (when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em)

5. How to understand how compensation issues affect performance

Course Content and Organization

Conceptual Framework: the course is divided into three parts with special emphasis on private equity financial analysis for transactions and portfolios. The course will analyze issues associated with both successful and troubled investments. We will address the issue of when to "double down" on an underperforming investment. We will incorporate a relative value approach in differentiating more attractive investments based upon their risk adjusted returns. The first module focuses on portfolio level issues, the second will review individual transactions and the third will look at the management and investment issues from the perspectives of both general partners and limited partners. The analysis will also include a study of firm economics and the resulting incentives from the 2/20 standard compensation model. Finally, students will prepare an investment proposal and present the investment concept.

Private equity real estate investments lend themselves to the case study method as virtually every subject requires both quantitative and qualitative analysis, judgment calls and development of a practical action plan. "Cold calling" is a frequent and important component of the class. Polling will be done frequently.

The course provides a framework as to how to underwrite the important aspects of making private investments: (i) risk; (ii) expected returns; (iii) relative value comparisons; and (iv) how the structure of the contract terms, i.e., the limited partnership agreements affect behavior.

Textbook readings and technical notes supplement the cases, while additional optional books and articles are suggested for more exposure to theoretical concepts. A very significant component of the course will be presentations by case protagonists, including leading industry figures. Senior executives from the industry will be in class to discuss the case and offer practical perspectives on lessons learned from the case. Out-of-class review sessions are offered by the professor to supplement concepts included in the case, particularly with regards to modeling certain concepts included in the given case. The workload and preparation are above average for the HBS EC courses.

Grading / Course Administration

To be successful in the course, one must be prepared as cold calling happens throughout the class. Also, it is expected that students adhere to HBS norms while in class. Grading guidelines are reflected below.

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved

Overview:

Real Estate is the world’s largest investment asset class at over $400 trillion. To succeed in the industry, individuals should understand the multidisciplinary nature of real estate. This requires knowledge of capital market flows, government regulation, real estate markets, negotiation, human psychology, law, organizational management, impacts of technology, and leadership in general.

The three instructors are all successful real estate investment practitioners and entrepreneurs who also have previously taught at HBS. Their careers span the spectrum of real estate disciplines described below.

Career Focus:

The course is designed for students interested in real estate development, acquisitions, property/portfolio management, investment management, advising as a fiduciary, or simply investing individually in real estate. Furthermore, as regulatory matters are critical to real estate, the course seeks to prepare students who desire to be local and national policy makers to enhance their understanding of real estate. Finally, as virtually every business field has corporate or operational real estate, the course also will be helpful to executives outside of the industry who need to make decisions regarding their real estate.

Educational Objectives:

The goal is for students to develop their knowledge and skillsets to understand, build and create real estate value. Discussions will include how one can become a better deal-maker and leader in the industry. Finally, the course seeks to balance those attributes within the context of real estate’s impact on the common good.

While the course is rigorous in financial content, it is suitable both for students pursuing full-time careers in real estate as well as those interested in developing a basic understanding of their own personal investments through home ownership, partnerships, or securities. It is also an excellent precursor for related Spring electives including Real Estate Private Equity and Real Estate Investing.

Course Content and Organization:

Module 1: The Basics

Introduce the analytical frameworks for real estate investing and development. Topics covered will be property valuation, cash flow, residual value, market analysis, roles of participants, terminology, and basic financial tools.

Module 2: Product Types

Develop a deeper understanding of the core “five major food groups”, office, industrial, multifamily, hotel, and retail. Other products to be introduced include senior living, self-storage, and specialty manufacturing. Students will learn about the development cycle (i.e. when is it better to build new product vs. buy existing buildings). What are the market dynamics, performance metrics, risk/return characteristics, timelines, investor interest, and societal acceptability of these various product types?

Module 3: Capital Markets

Understand the four quadrants of how real estate is capitalized,, including public and private equity as well as public and private debt. Classes will cover syndications, mortgages, joint ventures, hybrids, REIT’s and other forms of financing. This will include deal structuring and capital raising strategies.

Module 4: Negotiations and Workouts

Explore what happens when things go awry? How to deal with problem real estate deals? What are one’s leverage points in a workout? How might one avoid such pitfalls? How good a negotiator are you? Cases and a two day graded negotiation exercise are critical to this section.

Module 5: Real Estate and the Common Good

Understand some of the societal tradeoffs when creating value in real estate? To whom should the value accrue? What real estate products does society need? Who is impacted? What are the broader responsibilities of successful real estate professionals? How can you become a better leader through real estate?

Grading / Administration:

Participation: 55%

Final Exam 30%

Polls and Homework: 15% (primarily group work)

Course Content Keywords:

Real Estate, Development. Capital Markets, Property, REIT’s, Rent, Lease, Tenant, Sustainability, Acquisitions, Property Management, Asset Management, Portfolio Management.

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved

Overview:

Rapid urbanization is intensifying constraints in water, energy, land, housing, and food systems across both U.S. and global markets. At the same time, exposure to physical hazards—flood, heat, wildfire, drought, and storm surge—is increasing. These pressures operate simultaneously at multiple scales: the individual property, the operating business, the investment portfolio, the municipality, and the state.

The capital required to protect, retrofit, relocate, or redesign assets and communities is expected to far exceed public-sector capacity. Private capital will necessarily play a central role for decades. Yet markets for resilience and adaptation investment remain incomplete. Information asymmetries persist across homeowners, firms, insurers, lenders, municipalities, and investors. Risk perceptions diverge. Probabilistic reasoning is uneven. Exposure data are imperfect. Readiness varies widely.

This course equips students to evaluate how these gaps create both friction and opportunity.

Career Focus:

This course will be particularly useful to students who want to understand how urban growth and resilience will impact the attractiveness of capital allocation strategies; who wish to consult with businesses, organizations, or cities as those entities consider both economic development and the anticipation of possible increases in natural catastrophe risks; and finally for students interested in public land and building code policy as well as in climate ventures, insurance, insurance linked securities, REITs, FEMA and similar agencies, or real asset credit including mortgages, bonds, and private debt.

Educational Objectives:

This course equips students with a strategic and financial toolkit to identify and execute private-sector investment and entrepreneurial opportunities arising from climate risk and urban growth. Students examine:

• The development of new cities and large-scale urban districts under climate constraints

• Property-casualty insurance markets, reinsurance, and catastrophe bonds

• Probabilistic risk assessment and portfolio exposure management

• Self-organized pools of institutional capital targeting wildfire, flood, drought, heat, and related adaptation investments

The objective is not only to understand risk, but to price it, allocate capital around it, and build investable solutions in environments characterized by uncertainty, heterogeneous risk profiles, and persistent information asymmetry.

Course Content and Organization:

The course builds skills over three modules:

I. Urban dynamics. How US and global cities grow and compete with private sector led, government supported initiatives. What is physical resilience (the built environment)?

II. Analytical toolkit. How to assess risks, readiness, and resources to determine ROI for investing in resilience using probability and climate models

III. Opportunities. Entrepreneurship and private sector investment in buildings, cities, and regions in the resilience and adaptation value chain. Information asymmetry, differing risk preferences, and projected changes over time present promise.

Grading / Course Administration:

Participation 50%; polls and quizzes 20%; final paper 30%

Course Content Keywords:

Climate adaptation, resilience finance, climate change, urbanization, insurance, climate risk, urbanization, confederated finance, cities, economic development, flooding, wildfire, extreme heat, drought

Faculty Assistant: Fed Chavez, fchavez@hbs.edu,

Teaching Fellow: Mauro Morabito, mauromorabito@hks.harvard.edu

Introduction

More details on how to apply for this course will follow.

What does it mean to be alive and to be human right now? To what should we devote our lives?

This course is designed to support you in holding all that is happening with grace and joy, in
learning to access the deep resources of wisdom, power and compassion that lie at your core and
in building the internal and external support that will help you become the leader you were born
to be long after the course is over.

It has three components.

Diagnosis: We stand at a threshold. Our worlds – physical, social and political – are starting to
unravel. Old ways of behaving seem increasingly beside the point. But this is also a moment of
immense possibility. As old patterns and beliefs break up, they make room for the new.
Something is dying – and something is seeking to be born. What is it? What can we dare to
imagine? What could come through us?

Unpacking “Inner Work”. As Einstein is famously rumored to have said, one cannot solve
deeply rooted problems with the tools that created them. This is a moral, spiritual crisis as much
as it is a technological and political crisis, so in this course we will explore the hypothesis that in
order to become the leaders the world needs now we must complement our focus on analyzing,
acting and achieving with a focus on being, feeling and relating – that it is only through learning
to slow down, center, and access our deepest values that we can access the wisdom and courage
that we need. Drawing on neuroscience, psychology and the thousands of years of practical
wisdom held in the great faith traditions we will explore what it means to “go inside” and to
learn to relate to yourself and to others with skill, courage and compassion.

Integrating Love and Power Inner transformation is a powerful tool for change, but unless and
until we reimagine the deep structure of our society to center the integration of love and power –
from the nature of our accounting systems and the way we govern our firms to how we think
about our political systems and how we educate our children – we are unlikely to see the kinds of
fundamental change we need. What does this kind of change look like in practice? What does it
look like now? We will explore this question both theoretically and practically – inviting a wide
variety of heart centered leaders into the classroom to explore what it means to integrate love and
power on a daily basis.

Course Requirements

1. Attendance at every class is mandatory except in the case of pre-approved absences or
genuine emergencies. Please see the appendix for the formal implications of this
policy and for policies regarding such issues as grading, plagiarism, AI and the use
of technology in class.

2. Six short papers (500 words max) responding to the week’s readings, one due
approximately every other week at 5 pm the Sunday before class. Prompts for these
papers will be posted to Canvas a week in advance.

3. Membership in a small learning circle that will meet for an hour every week. Your goal
will be to support each other’s learning and to explore together how you might implement
what you are learning in your own life.

A Note on Experiential Practice

We will invest a significant amount of time in shared experiential practices. We will, for
example, practice deep listening, holding grief and other difficult emotions, perspective-seeking
and perspective-taking and exploring our reactivity when we are confronted with difficult ideas
and different opinions. Participation in all the exercises will be entirely voluntary, but there will
be challenging moments. I will do my best to support the creation of a “good enough” container
– but I will be relying on your to actively participate in holding whatever emerges in ways that
can support a transformational process for all of us. If at any time you feel unsafe or
uncomfortable please reach out to me or another remember of the teaching team so that we can
find a way to support you going forward.

An Invitation to Personal Practice

For thousands of years humans have relied on some kind of personal practice to regulate their
emotions and connect themselves to their deepest sense of purpose and meaning. In this class I
will invite those of you who already have such a practice to go deeper, and if you don’t already
have such a practice, I will invite you to spend at least ten minutes each day experimenting with
a variety of practices in the service of finding something that will help you learn to relax and
center. Participation on this front is not required and will not be graded, but it is highly
recommended.

Required Books

Please note: you won’t be asked to read these books cover to cover – just to read some selected
chapters.
a) Reimagining Capitalism, Rebecca Henderson
b) Power & Love: A theory and practice of social change, Adam Kahane

Books to consider reading over the Break

a) The Nutmeg’s Curse: Amitav Gosh
b) Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson
c) The Great Transition: Nick Fuller Googins

If you care deeply about climate, these are great books to read whether or not you end up taking
this class. The Nutmeg’s Curse is a hugely well written historical account of the origins the
Western world view - full of great stories and quietly terrifying. Highly recommended.

Both The Ministry of the Future and The Great Transition are sci-fi novels that attempt to paint
reasonably plausible pictures of how we might respond effectively to climate change. They are
very different. Ministry focuses on global geo-politics and finance as a route to survival – The
Great Transition focuses on social revolution at the grass roots. Ministry is harder going but
more specific – many people love it - while Great Transition is a rollicking read.

Overview:

This course combines two half-courses from previous years, RoGME and SPACE, into a full course that explores fundamental questions about how we build, grow, and govern markets and economic society, using as a uniquely powerful case study the development of the space economy.

Space is a place of unparalleled possibility for humanity, and it is in the midst of a revolution that will shape our future. By closely studying this revolution, we will accomplish two complementary objectives. First, we will discover how each of us can be a part of this historic opportunity, as we are joined by leaders in the industry – including prominent HBS alumni – eager to help you join them in building a new space age with the private sector as its engine. Second, we will use space as a mirror through which to better understand and use the role of government in market economies here on Earth, as space gives us a chance to see familiar policy problems in a new light.

This is a course for students who want to think very big. It will be intellectually demanding, combining a rigorous theoretical economic framework with discussions that go well beyond textbook theories. We will ask a lot of each other, but we will also be inspired to help create a brighter future for humanity both in this world and beyond.

Career Focus:

RoGME in Space is designed for any student who aims to lead private-sector institutions of systemic importance, influence public debates over government policy, or occupy policymaking positions at some point in their careers. Exceptional private-sector leaders are now widely expected to provide leadership and insight on policy issues; those who contribute meaningfully to these debates will substantially increase their influence and impact.

Why, then, do we study space as part of this course? Space is so intertwined in our everyday technologies, and our capabilities in space are expanding so rapidly, that every industry, every function, and every geography will depend on and utilize space to drive value. Moreover, as we grow the space economy, we find that the most fundamental policy issues from terrestrial societies reappear, in new and thought-provoking forms. No matter your path after HBS, understanding space will make you a smarter and more innovative leader.

Finally, if you’re already planning (or even coming from) a career in space, you know that HBS has staked out a leading position in the sector among our peer business schools. This course is the home base of the HBS space network, with members from startup founders to senior executives at the largest NASA contractors and everyone in between. We want your expertise in our discussions, and we’re sure you’ll come away with a more holistic (and informed) perspective on all aspects of the sector.

Educational Objectives:

Above all, RoGME in Space will give you the tools with which to reason through, and discuss with sophistication, some of the most important questions and opportunities facing our economies and societies today and for decades, even centuries, to come.

Each session in RoGME in Space does three things: first, educate students on a key aspect the space sector or pressing policy issue; second, illustrate a powerful concept from the social sciences that sharpens students’ understanding; third, deliver insights that go beyond textbook theories. As we proceed through the full set of discussions, many but not all using the space economy as context, we also come to see them as specific observations of a more fundamental discussion over the role of the government.

Course Content and Organization:

RoGME in Space consists of three modules, each of which builds upon the previous as we explore fundamental ideas from economic theory about the role of government, using space as a mirror throughout.

In the first module, we study the power of market forces to drive efficiency and innovation. Market economies are miraculous when at their best: flexible, self-correcting, and above all efficient. And the commercial revolution in the past two decades of the space sector give us a chance to examine in concrete detail the effects, and complications, of bringing these features to bear in a sector from which they have been long absent.

In the second module, we confront the reality that markets are not always at their best. In space and on Earth, real-world departures from the hypothetical ideal market mean that government policy might improve the efficiency of the economy, in principle making all individuals better off. We also consider how society may want government policy to pursue goals beyond, or in addition to, efficiency. We study space debris, antitrust and innovation, public funding vs. public provision, property rights, national security, and more. Of course, using the government in practice is often more complicated than the textbook analysis suggests, so in each example we also discuss the risks involved in policy interventions.

In the third module, we bring our tools to bear on one of the greatest opportunities humans will ever have to build societies anew. As we expand human activities in space, how should we structure our societies? How should we design fiscal policy, monetary policy, taxation, social spending, and other basic institutions of government? What defines success, and who gets to decide? Each of us will form, using the ideas and examples from the course, our own vision of space and humans’ place in it. And we will reflect on what they teach us about our societies – and how we could make them better – here on Earth.

Grading / Course Administration:

50% of each student’s grade will be based on participation and engagement in class discussions, including pre-class polls, and 50% will be based on a written project of approximately 2500 words that demonstrates the student’s ability to apply the course material to a relevant topic of interest.

Course Content Keywords:

Economics, space, innovation, technology, taxation, government, national security.

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved

Spring | 14 Sessions
Evaluation: Class participation

More than one-third of HBS MBA students join professional services—strategy consulting, investment banking, equity research, accounting, executive search, technology-enabled advisory, and increasingly, entrepreneurial professional service firms. Professionals exercise judgment grounded in expertise to deliver valued service to their clients.

These days, professional services are experiencing a tsunami of change. Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming where expertise resides, what expertise is scarce, how value is created, and how judgment is exercised. Change is being accelerated by additional tailwinds: a rapidly shifting geopolitical landscape that is reconfiguring global supply chains and business networks and increasing economic uncertainty and volatility, and the growing role of outside capital in financing professional service firms (PSFs).

This course examines how these forces are reshaping professional services, and what it will take to succeed as a professional in this new context. This course is designed for students who expect to join a PSF, build a new firm or join one that aims to disrupt existing PSFs, invest in professional services, or sell to PSFs.

We will study a range of professional services undergoing radical change:

• Strategy consulting firms are confronting shifting client demands and dramatically rethinking how they develop and deploy talent.
• Technology service firms are racing to adapt as AI disrupts traditional offerings.
• A revolution is brewing in healthcare delivery, catalyzed by AI-driven innovations at health-tech firms.
• Executive search is being reshaped by AI and private equity.
• EdTech firms are reconfiguring their business models.
• AI-native LegalTech firms are poised to introduce profound changes to the legal services profession.
• Traditional equity research and asset management firms are undergoing dramatic transformation as they face new, AI-enabled competitors.
• Backed by private equity, the strategic communications industry faces consolidation.
• Despite entering the accounting sector only in 2025, private equity already has ownership stakes in more than 20% of the U.S. non-Big Four accounting firms (by revenue).
• The Internet broadly, and AI particularly, have lowered barriers to entry in professional services, enabling entrepreneurial entry, including some launched by recent HBS graduates.

The course uses the case method, supplemented by practitioner perspectives and analytical notes. We will examine both established incumbents and entrepreneurial entrants across consulting, financial services, accounting, executive search, legal services, and technology-enabled professional services.

Across these settings, common themes will emerge. PSFs operate simultaneously in three markets—the markets for services, talent, and capital—and all three are being transformed. PSFs are moving beyond time-based billing toward alternative pricing models such as fixed fees, value-based pricing, and subscriptions. Many are evolving from standalone service providers into platforms embedded in broader ecosystems. Traditional organizational pyramids are narrowing, reshaping hiring, professional development, and career progression. Skill requirements are changing rapidly. Entrepreneurship is no longer a dream to be addressed only after decades of working in professional services; AI-native PSFs launched by young entrepreneurs are sprouting up. Historically partnership-based firms are reconsidering ownership and governance to access external capital and fund technology investment.

Yet even amid this transformation, enduring questions remain: What defines a professional? Why does society grant professionals significant autonomy? In SPARC, we will explore this tension between continuity and disruption. What aspects of professional services are timeless, and what must evolve?

SPARC explores this tension between continuity and disruption. In so doing, it asks: How might professionals compete, organize, and lead differently in an AI-infused world? And how should they approach their work and careers to achieve both impact and meaning?

Grades will be based on class participation (50%) and a final paper (50%), which may be completed individually or in teams of two.

Career Focus

Scaling Technology Ventures (STV) is designed for students who aspire to found, join, or invest in growth-stage technology ventures. Students will learn how leadership teams address the challenges and opportunities ventures face after achieving product-market fit – and how to activate and manage exponential growth.

The course reflects the recent shift in market sentiment from “growth at all costs” to “find a path to profitability,” in placing particular emphasis on how ventures scale by achieving not just product-market fit, but profit-market fit.

Classes cover a diverse array of tech and tech-enabled businesses, including e-commerce, ed-tech, SaaS, HR-tech, mobile apps and gaming, marketplace platforms, mobility solutions, social media, two-sided platforms, robotics, and cybersecurity.

Educational Objectives

The course exists to address a gap in management scholarship between two fundamental stages of corporate development – exploration and exploitation. This model leaves out a critical phase connecting these two stages, which the course calls extrapolation – the period of dramatic top-line growth that occurs midway through a typical S-curve, after a venture has confirmed product-market fit and raised its first round of VC financing.

Adopting the perspective of a founder and CEO, a functional leader, or an investor, cases in the course frame many of the critical opportunities and challenges associated with activating exponential growth and managing through the extrapolation phase as a venture scales. Scaling situations are presented through a variety of functional lenses, including strategy, product management, sales and marketing, engineering and technology, talent, and operations.

In nearly every class, the course hosts case protagonists – founders, CEOs, and some VCs – as guests, mostly in person and on campus. Many guests also stay for roundtable lunches with students after classes.

Students have the opportunity to participate in several optional workshops with guests and outside experts. In past years, topics have included product management, performance marketing, venture capital, and diversity in tech.

Scaling Technology Ventures is a natural companion, and complement to, the EC course Launching Technology Ventures (LTV), though there is little if any overlap between the two courses.

Enrollment in STV is limited to 70 students per section.

Course Content

Through case discussions and dialogue with company founders, STV examines executive leadership and functional management challenges in scaling ventures after the "search and discovery" stage of startup evolution. Case companies have included Asana, BlaBlaCar, Catalant, Chegg, Chewy, Cobalt Robotics, Darktrace, FIGS, Mistral, Nextdoor, OhmConnect, Perch, Linden Lab, Supercell, Shopify, thredUP, TikTok, Wayfair, and Zoom, among others. The course also features an online computer-gaming simulation that enables students to compete against one another as rival SaaS firms vying for users, market position, and capital investment.

Case classes are organized into six modules that comprise the course’s Six S Scaling Framework. These variables represent external and internal enablers of successful scaling:

Activating Growth

Strategic Opportunity and Market: What does it take to “cross the chasm” to the early majority? How large is the serviceable addressable market, and will it support scaling? How scalable and repeatable is the business model?

Scope and Speed: How does a venture scale by expanding into new geographies, products, and markets? What does it take to manage multiple revenue streams? How fast should your expansion or diversification take place?

Solution: What constitutes a repeatable and scalable offer? How does the offer maintain sufficient homogeneity to address an extensible market, while establishing sufficient differentiation to fend off competitors?

Managing Growth

Structure: When and how should a rapidly scaling venture introduce more formal roles, systems, and processes? What organizational design choices favor scaling? What are the trade-offs between autonomy and control?

Senior Team: When should a venture replace its founder with a “professional” CEO? At what point should you recruit experienced executives into leadership positions? When should you start hiring specialists over generalists?

Spirit: How do scaling ventures design culture? How do they assimilate hires who are less mission-driven and more political than the first wave of recruits? How do ventures mitigate friction between the old guard and new talent?

Final Deliverable

Students have a choice between taking a final exam or completing a final project. The exam consists of a course-relevant case with assignment questions. The project invites students to apply course concepts to a scaling venture. For the project, students are encouraged to work in teams to address opportunities and/or challenges presented by their project sponsors and then prepare a report outlining their research, analyses, and recommendations.

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Career Focus

SESC is tailored for individuals aiming to pioneer and lead positive and lasting change within various sectors, including social enterprises, government, and the private sector. Whether you aspire to launch or lead a social enterprise, innovate within policymaking and philanthropy, catalyze systemic change, or drive corporate social responsibility initiatives, this course provides the critical insights, frameworks and tools needed. Graduates will be well-positioned for roles that demand a deep understanding of leading and scaling social enterprises and designing and implementing solutions that drive measurable systemic change.

Who should take the course and why?

1. Aspiring social entrepreneurs (both for-profit and non-profit) who want to lead effective social enterprises that create impact and ultimately solve big social and environmental problems.
2. Business leaders who seek to influence the systems that can generate positive social change.
3. People whose work will be influenced by changing systems (e.g. climate, equality, healthcare, education), whether they are directly involved or not so they can better understand and make a positive contribution to the forces shaping their ecosystems.
4. People who are involved in systems change through a governance or advisory capacity, such as serving on non-profit boards, as a major donor, or in consulting roles.

Educational Objectives

1. Enhance your ability to critically analyze social enterprises and understand how to lead and scale them effectively.
2. Learn how to design and implement strategies that effectively address systemic problems that lie beyond the capacity of any single social enterprise or organization.
3. Gain insights into how different sectors can work together towards common goals, understanding the roles of policy, business, and non-profit organizations in driving systemic solutions.
4. Cultivate leadership skills necessary for navigating the challenges of social entrepreneurship and systemic change, focusing on resilience, stakeholder engagement, and adaptive strategy.
5. Create a community of students from across the university who are passionate about social and environmental change, and connect with over 500 alumni of the course, many of whom are building high growth social enterprises.

Course Overview

Social entrepreneurs don’t just build organizations, they change systems. This course will explore the frameworks, tools, mindsets, and best practices that successful social entrepreneurs use to maximize their impact. The course not only looks at social entrepreneurship through the lens of traditional entrepreneurship, but also asks how people motivated by disrupting entrenched and often inequitable systems differ from traditional entrepreneurs. We will look at differences in mindset and character; capacity for systems thinking; empathy in product/service design; and their ability to navigate diverse sources of capital to build either for-profit, nonprofit, or hybrid organizations. SESC take a deep dive into how social entrepreneurs can become systems entrepreneurs by developing a coherent systems strategy, collaborating with others, building power, and mobilizing change.

Since the skills required to sustain effective engagement with social systems can differ subtly from the organizational management skills often deployed by social enterprises, the course also discusses the distinct leadership capabilities needed to sustain multi-stakeholder systems change efforts. The course features a diverse group of protagonists in diverse contexts (issues, geographies, stages, organizational forms), but asks students to go deep on a single social entrepreneur of their choice over the semester, culminating with an integrative final assignment that through a peer review process can lead to the development of a new case study for the class.

Course Modules

1. Introduction to Social Entrepreneurship and Systems Change: Overview of foundational concepts, mindsets of social entrepreneurs, and the importance of systems thinking as an intuitive lens to achieving long-lasting impact.
2. Designing for Systems Change: The process of developing and testing effective solutions to enduring problems through the idea of being proximate, using design thinking to identify needs, and understanding the role of positive deviance in identifying workable solutions.
3. Building and Scaling Social Enterprises: The steps to build social enterprises from identifying the right funding sources (venture philanthropy and impact investing), to developing strategies for direct scale and replication, to evaluation practices, to governing for excellence. The module concludes with cases that shift towards indirect approaches to scale via policy and mindset shifts.
4. Understanding Complex Challenges & Implementing System Solutions: Tools and frameworks for analyzing complex problems: stakeholder mapping, identifying leverage points, and designing context-specific solutions. Exploring effective strategies for influencing systemic change, including collaboration, innovation, and narrative shifting.
5. The Role of Business in Systems Change: Examines how business leaders can contribute to solving complex social issues in collaboration with government and nonprofit sectors.
6. Leadership for Systems Change: Insights into the personal and professional journey of systems leaders, including skill development, risk management, and the cultivation of resilience.

Assessment

Grades will be based on class participation (50%), and a final project (50%). The final project is a paper written in several parts that profiles a social enterprise of one’s choosing and using the tools and frameworks of the course, assess the strengths and weaknesses of the organization, with a peer review process to learn from one another’s work and propose a new case study for future iterations of the course.

Why This Course

SESC provides a holistic approach to tackling social and environmental problems. This course offers a unique opportunity to learn from both leading academics and experienced practitioners, inspiring students to become effective agents of change in their communities and beyond. The faculty are both experienced social entrepreneurs and systems change agents, who bring a wealth of real-world experience and insights into the classroom. The course structure is further enriched by extensive contributions from expert guests, ensuring that most classes feature talks and interactive sessions with leaders from various sectors. These practitioners will share their experiences, challenges, and strategies, providing students with unparalleled exposure to contemporary issues and solutions in the field of social entrepreneurship and systems change.

Copyright © 2025 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Course Overview

Please watch this video for more information on this course.

Spiritual Lives of Leaders engages in a conversation that we seldom have at Harvard Business School – or across Harvard generally – that we believe you’ll find fascinating, inspiring, challenging, and useful. We invite everyone to participate equally in this conversation – whether you describe yourself as interested and curious, spiritual but not religious, an atheist or agnostic, a charismatic believer, or a lapsed fill-in-the-blank.

Students who experienced the course in its J-Term origins and in its first full-term offering last spring have come brimming with deeply personal and practical questions: What is “spirituality”? How can it be cultivated? How is it different from religious belief, or faith? What does “spiritually-grounded leadership” look like? How can I reconcile apparent tensions between my faith and the demands and aspirations of career and life? What do I need to know about the faith traditions of others to succeed as a leader operating in different communities around the world? Why do the institutions of religion so often fall short – or do real damage, contributing to deep division and conflict?

In Spiritual Lives of Leaders, we aim to create a space apart from the high hurry of our day-to-day lives to explore these questions, and more. We’ve curated an amazing community of leaders, scholars, and thinkers from around the world to help us. Many of the leaders we invite fit us into very crowded calendars precisely because this area is important to them, and yet they don’t often get asked about their deepest commitments and influences that inform their leadership.

Why Should You Take This Course?

The following are questions that students who have taken this course have shared with us. If any of these resonate with you, that’s a pretty good sign that you would find value in joining our conversation and our community:

Living an Integrated, Purposeful Life

• “How do I live an integrated life where I can bring my faith and my own beliefs into the workplace? How do I integrate my career aspirations with my own personal values and personal aspirations?”
• “I’m curious what I can learn from religions not my own to make me a better leader for the future teams I get the opportunity to lead.”

Role of Spirituality in the Lives of Leaders

• “How do senior leaders translate convictions and insights from their private, internal spiritual lives to their public, external leadership?”
• “What is the role of spirituality and religion in the lives of high-pressure decision-makers? Is there a difference between the two?”
• “How can I build deep, enduring relationships with my business partners in other cultures by understanding their spiritual practices and commitments?”

When Faith and Work Collide

• “How can I hold strong to my personal faith while leading in a secular organization?”
• “When (if ever) is it appropriate for me to talk about my own faith and beliefs in the workplace, while also ensuring that I am being inclusive?”

Bringing Meaning to Work

• “How can we bring meaning and purpose to the day-to-day lives of our employees?”
• “How can an atheist create a bond that seems to automatically exist between spiritual people?”

Repairing the World

• “How can leadership bring people together and away from the current divisive rhetoric and populism? How can leaders, especially young women, navigate challenging power asymmetry situations where there is very little appetite for change from within?”
• “In many contexts, religion and faith traditions appear to create deep division, conflict, and animosity toward others, so is there anything to be done without rejecting spirituality and faith altogether?”

Requirements

• Attend 28 80-minute class sessions across the 13 weeks of term.
• Attend five Journey Group sessions across the semester, which are included in the overall class schedule; groups are formed from a small cohort of students drawn from across participating Harvard schools.
• Attend one optional field trip to the Arnold Arboretum on Saturday, April 18, to participate in a tour led by Ned Friedman, the Arboretum’s director. At student request, we might schedule additional optional visits to destinations such as the Harvard Art Museum, the Harvard Dance Center, and a field retreat to a site such as the Society of St. John the Evangelist (just across the river) or Blue Cliff Monastery.
• Volunteer to design and lead sessions with invited guests, who will feature in many of our class sessions. Committed guests include Vas Narasimhan, CEO of Novartis; Jack Lew, former US Treasury Secretary and former US ambassador to Israel; Ken Frazier (CEO Emeritus, Merck); Laurie Patton, president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and former president of Middlebury College; and Khalil Abdur-Rashid, Muslim chaplain of Harvard University.
• Submit a final paper or project reflecting on your spiritual journey and learning across the semester.

Grading

There are two graded requirements:

1. Class participation
2. Final paper/project

Participation is assessed more by quality and intensity of engagement than by simple quantity of classroom comments. We offer numerous opportunities across term to demonstrate engagement with the course and our guests and to help build a sense of community in the classroom and beyond.

Course Premise

Spirituality, faith, and religion play a crucial role in many people’s lives. They undergird convictions about right and wrong, help people to persevere through great hardship, inform people’s self-understanding and meaning-making, and shape people’s worldviews. In the best case, spirituality, faith, and religion can bring people together. In the worst case, so recently in evidence on campus and around the world, they can tear people apart.

Despite their centrality to many people’s experiences, however, spirituality, faith, and religion remain relatively unexamined—especially from a personal perspective—across the University. This course provides an opportunity to address this gap by bringing together students and faculty from across the University to explore what we can learn in conversation with leaders around the world who are informed by these practices and commitments.

This course grows out of our highly successful experience in piloting this curriculum across three well-subscribed J-Term SIPs and an inaugural full-term offering last spring. Student interest in this course has grown each year we have offered it, and we continue to shape and improve the course each year to match most closely student needs and interests. While we expect a strong student base from among our own MBAs, we are reserving seats to accommodate a group of committed cross-registrants.

Aspiring cross-registrants desiring more information about the course can reach out to our teammates in their respective schools and programs, including Assistant Dean Laura Tuach (HDS), Adjunct Lecturer Metta McGarvey (HGSE), Professor Scott Westfahl (HLS), Professor Howard Koh (HSPH), Senior Fellow Tina Fernandez (ALI) and HBS Executive Fellows Angie Thurston and Rich Phillips. This course is a move toward reconnection, toward integration, not just for the purpose of making meaning for ourselves but also to reconnect with each other.

Course Goals

By the end of the course, students should understand how an awakened sense and understanding of spirituality and faith traditions can drive both individual and corporate purpose, as they have seen this modeled in invited leaders from the realms of business, public health, education, and public policy. They also should have a better sense of how this awakened sense can help them to guide their own personal and professional agency across careers of increasing responsibility. Most broadly, they will have a deeper appreciation and understanding for what has been a crucial aspect of existence for individuals and societies.

Our hope is that this course will have a profound influence on your self-understanding, on your formation as a leader, on your understanding of the communities in which you will operate, and on your sense of personal purpose.

Course Outline

To serve the objectives outlined above, we are planning to organize our term into three principal modules, focused on three stages of the development of a global leader. These stages, with examples of existing curriculum that students have encouraged us to continue to offer, are presented below. We are continuing to build out our plans and guest list and invite your active participation even before term begins.

I. The Inner Journey – Learning to Make Meaning

• Spiritual Grounding in Times of Crisis
• The Case for Inner Work
• Developing Inner Strengths: Spiritually Grounded Leadership from the Inside Out
• Cultivating Spiritual Values

II. The Outer Journey – Focusing On Your Leadership Role

• Making Meaning in the Workplace
• Faith as An Enabler and Disabler
• Linking Spirituality, Health and Leadership
• Poetic Justice: Islam and Business

III. Moving Beyond – Locating Purpose in the World

• Moral Growth as a Business Leader
• Spiritual Philanthropy in Emerging Markets
• Spirituality in Technology
• Regenerative Capitalism
• Finding Meaning in Relationship with Nature

Readings and Teaching Formats

The assigned readings for the course will be drawn from a variety of sources, including a curated selection of readings from ancient wisdom traditions as well as contemporary readings, some composed by invited guests. While we have developed a number of case studies for use in the course, we will balance experiential learning with case-based pedagogy, as well as live interaction with our invited guests.

We are currently assembling the final reading list for the course and can offer recommendations to students wishing to dive in across the summer and fall.

Journey Groups

In the third week of class, each student will be assigned to a 5-person Journey Group. Groups will be designed to be cross-sectional in nature, with representatives drawn from across participating schools in the University. This group will meet five times across the semester, at regularly scheduled intervals during class time.

Journey Groups are intended as safe, confidential spaces for students to share their understanding of their guiding values and to keep track of their own spiritual exploration across term. A favorite exercise is called Rivers of Life, in which students draw (yes, with colored pencils and drawing paper) a map of the significant life experiences that have shaped the leaders they have been, and are becoming.

A student shared with us this past year that her Journey Group was different from any other small group she participated in at school because “this is the only meeting that is about me.” That’s not a bad statement of our ambition in creating this aspect of the curriculum.

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Career Focus

SVC should appeal to students who aspire to work in senior leadership positions (CEO, CFO, COO, or CMO) in both large and small companies; as strategy consultants or investment bankers who advise companies; or as private equity, public equity, venture capital, or hedge fund investors who will invest companies and want a better understanding of what creates value and why.

Educational Objectives

SVC is a capstone course that integrates and further develops concepts developed in RC Courses namely Finance 1, Finance 2, and Strategy, and to a lesser extent LEAD, Marketing, and LCA. It is a case-based course that is designed to provide students with the knowledge, skills, and judgment needed to make important investment, strategic, and operating decisions. The goal is to see value creation as an important—but by no means the only—corporate objective and a guiding principle for making important business decisions. In short, the goal is to develop a value creation mindset.

The course emphasizes the development of practical insights rather than formal theories, and the application of relevant theories to practice. Toward that end, the course includes several “Policy Days” which analyze current policy debates in corporate America such as payout policy (share repurchases), CEO pay, and activist investors. The policy days typically follow related cases and use readings from business journals, academic journals, and trade publications to illustrate opposing viewpoints.

Course Content and Organization

Cases typically analyze the value implications of major strategic decisions or the structure and performance of unique business models. It will utilize more strategy concepts (creating and sustaining competitive advantage, managing competitive interactions, etc.) than a typical RC Finance class, and will utilize more financial concepts (measuring value and assessing risk) than a typical RC Strategy class. It is designed to teach a set of quantitative tools (microeconomics of supply and demand curves, the strategic value of optionality, the concept of price elasticity, etc.) and frameworks that will help you make better business decisions.

The course has five modules based on the Value Driver Framework developed by Fruhan and others.

● Understanding Value Creation (the Value Driver Framework)

● Creating Competitive Advantage

● Sustaining Competitive Advantage

● Driving Profitable Growth

● Setting Corporate Objectives

NOTE: Because there is considerable overlap between this course (SVC, course #1417) and the fall course Corporate Finance: Corporate Financial Operations (CFO, course #1416), students cannot take both of them.

Course Content Keywords: Capstone course, value creation, leadership, general management, strategy, financial management, public policy, practical finance, cross-functional, conceptual integration

Overview

This course explores the unique aspects of creating effective strategies for technology-intensive businesses. What are effective strategies for winning in markets with network effects? How can technology be leveraged to build multisided platforms? How can firms create and capture the value from intellectual property assets? What are the unique challenges of governing technology-intensive firms? And how can they build and sustain value in emerging technologies?

Industries covered range widely, including Generative AI, esports, autonomous vehicles, collaboration tools, cybersecurity, cloud services, e-commerce, social networking, browsers, semiconductors, operating systems, streaming media, intellectual property, mobile communications, electronic ink, blockchain, crypto currency, and wearable technology.

Career Focus:

The course should be of particular interest to those interested in managing a business for which technology is likely to play a major role, and to those interested in consulting, private equity or venture capital. The course may also be valuable for students who do not necessarily plan to pursue a career related to technology. Indeed, the concepts and frameworks covered (e.g., network effects, judo strategy, multisided platforms) apply well beyond technology industries.

Educational Objectives:

This course aims to equip students with the frameworks necessary to lead, build, and invest in technology-intensive businesses. We explore critical concepts such as network effects, multisided platforms, and intellectual property management. The ultimate objective is to develop leaders who can look forward and reason back to devise strategies that build sustainable competitive advantage around technologies of today and in the future.

Course Content and Organization:

The course is structured into six modules:

Network Effects: Technology-intensive businesses have unique attributes, which make their products increasingly valuable if more consumers buy their product or if more complements become available. What are the implications for market tipping, pricing and growth strategies?

Multisided Platforms (MSPs): The most important competitive battles in technology are no longer between standalone products or services, but between platforms. Many of the most successful companies are those who build multisided platforms (MSPs), which spawn large ecosystems of users and suppliers of complementary products and services. Why and how are MSPs different from “normal” firms? What are the key strategies for creating successful MSPs?

Competitive Tactics: Many of the critical challenges in fast-moving technology businesses are tactical in nature: how and when do firms cooperate and compete with firms within their industry? How can small firms use their larger competitors’ size to their own advantage (judo strategy)? When and how can large firms impose their will (sumo strategy) against other players in their ecosystem, without running afoul of antitrust laws?

Managing Intellectual Property: A defining characteristic of technology industries is the disproportionate share of value which resides in intellectual property (IP) assets. We will explore the current challenges in the system of patents, how firms create IP and build business models enabling them to appropriate value from their IP.

Governance of Technology Firms: Startups and large firms in the technology world face special governance problems, especially asymmetrical information between management and boards.

Look Forward, Reason Back: Large-scale industry change happens faster in technology than in other markets. Cutting edge technologies have unique problems related to untested demand, uncertain performance, and the challenge of how firms can build and maintain their competitive edge in order to take advantage of new technological opportunities. This module explores how managers ‘look forward’ into highly uncertain environments, then ‘reason back’ to devise strategies for today.

Grading / Course Administration:

Grading is based on class participation, pre-class polls and exercises, and a final project.

Course Content Keywords:

Strategy; Technology; Network Effects; Multisided Platforms; Intellectual Property; Competitive Tactics; Artificial Intelligence; Software; Hardware

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Overview of Strategy for Entrepreneurs: AI Lab

AI tools are transforming who can build a company, how fast they can build it, and—most critically—where lasting advantage comes from. When anyone can stand up a polished product in a weekend, the old moats of technical complexity, access to capital, and even specialized talent begin to erode. The central strategic question for entrepreneurs is no longer: can I build this? But instead: where will my advantage come from once everyone else can build it too?

Strategy for Entrepreneurs: AI Lab is a hands-on course that teaches you to build with state-of-the-art AI tools and to think strategically about where value accrues in an AI-powered world. AI accelerates every part of the entrepreneurial learning cycle—theorizing, building, experimenting, and iterating—but it also makes the judgment about where to apply it the binding constraint. The course is structured in two phases.

In the first phase, you will learn to use AI to fully imitate someone else's business. On day one, you'll identify an existing company you believe is vulnerable to AI-driven disruption. Over the following weeks, you'll attempt to replicate that company's core offering using AI. The goal isn't just to create a competitor; it's to discover firsthand where AI gets you 80% of the way there, where it gets stuck, and what remains genuinely hard to copy. This exercise will build your fluency with contemporary AI tools while teaching you, experientially, where moats live. You'll write up what you learned—what was easy, what was hard, and what that implies about the company's sources of advantage. The learning comes not just from the building but from reflecting on where the building broke down.

You will then choose your own path. If you have a startup idea you want to develop, you will follow the startup track and shift to building your own venture using the course's frameworks and tools. Your idea need not be an AI product; all startup ideas are welcome and can benefit from this course.

If you don't have a startup idea, you can continue down the imitation track, continuing to test what AI can and cannot replicate in the company you selected to better understand where durable advantage lives in the age of AI. This track is especially well suited for those not ready to become a founder right at graduation and for future investors, joiners, and product managers.

Career Focus

This course is designed for students who intend to be entrepreneurs, early-stage joiners, or investors. The two-track structure means you don't need a startup idea to get full value from the course: the imitation track is built for students headed into investing, product management, corporate strategy, or other roles where understanding AI's impact on competitive dynamics matters as much as building with the tools yourself. More broadly, given AI's accelerating impact on the knowledge economy, the tools, frameworks, and strategic thinking developed in this course are relevant for anyone pursuing a knowledge work career. If AI is going to reshape how your industry creates and captures value, this course will help you understand how.

No technical background is required, but curiosity about using technical tools is. Students with technical backgrounds and experience using AI tools will also still benefit from the course’s exercises and build sessions.

Educational Objectives

By the end of this course, students will be able to:

• Build with state-of-the-art AI tools. Get hands-on fluency with tools ranging from Claude Code to Codex to OpenClaw to Magic Patterns to Lovable to Replit and more. The goal is not to master a single tool, but to build the judgment and skills necessary to use the AI tools that are most effective for the work you want to get done.

• Map AI into how a firm works. Identify where AI creates the most value within a business—not just on individual tasks but across the full chain of activities—and how to reorganize around it to capture those gains.

• Identify durable sources of advantage in an AI world. Understand what is and isn't defensible when AI commoditizes building. Distinguish between what AI can replicate and the scarce complements—taste, relationships, domain expertise, data, regulatory positioning—that remain valuable.

• Stress-test theories of value. Use AI as an imitation tool to pressure-test existing businesses and your own startup ideas, revealing where moats hold and where they don't.

• Run experiments and learn from feedback. Whether building your own venture or stress-testing someone else's, design and run experiments that generate real signals about whether an idea works, and give and receive honest feedback on entrepreneurial strategies.

• Write clearly and persuasively about strategy. Articulate a venture's theory of value creation and capture through the iterative courser memo process.

Course Content and Organization

The course is structured around 50% case discussion and 50% hands-on building. Each week alternates between a case discussion and a build exercise so that strategic frameworks and hands-on practice reinforce each other. Cases feature a mix of developed materials and live discussions with founders. Given the rapid pace of AI development, the full case list is in flux and will be largely assembled over the second half of 2026 to ensure students are learning at the frontier.

The course is organized into three parts and a final wrap:

Part 1: Imitation and Advantage — Can You Clone It? (Weeks 1–4) You'll pick a company you believe is at risk of AI disruption and run an imitation experiment: try to replicate its core offering using AI tools and see if what you build can substitute for the real thing. This builds your tool fluency while forcing you to confront what is and isn't defensible. You'll write up where AI got you most of the way, where it fell short, and what that tells you about where advantage actually lives. At the end of Part 1, students choose their path: builders shift to their own startup idea; imitators continue stress-testing existing companies. Both tracks use the same memo structure, peer feedback process, and strategic frameworks.

Part 2: The Mapping Problem — Where Does AI Create Value? (Weeks 5–8) Most people know AI can help with individual tasks. The harder question is: which tasks actually matter for your business, and does improving them with AI make the whole firm better—or does a bottleneck somewhere else eat the gains? That's the mapping problem—and learning to solve it is what separates firms that see real performance gains from those that don't. You'll run a mapping experiment—systematically testing where AI can and cannot be deployed across your venture's (or target company's) activities, and whether improving one part of the process moves the needle overall. Cases include Fazeshift (AI for accounts receivable), Claude Code, new follow-on “B” cases delving deeper into companies like Gamma and Lovable, and live sessions with AI-native founders who are building with AI from the ground up.

Part 3: AI-Enabled Business Models (Weeks 9–12) AI doesn't just change how you build, it also changes how your venture makes money. The final third of the course explores how AI reshapes unit economics, what it means for how much capital a startup needs, and how AI can enable entirely new business models. You'll run a business model experiment—testing whether AI changes your venture's cost structure, pricing, or path to market. Can you turn a services business into a product? Can you reach customers you couldn't afford to reach before? Can you build a company that needs a fraction of the capital it would have required two years ago? The goal is to learn which business models AI now makes viable; and which are now at risk. In progress cases include Quilter (AI for PCB layouts), Ranger (AI for QA testing), and more.

Final Course Fest and Wrap (Week 13) Builders pitch their ventures; imitators present findings on where AI disruption is and isn't working. All students receive peer and faculty feedback and submit final memos and products.

The Strategy for Entrepreneurs Memo and Peer Feedback Sessions Running through the entire course is the Strategy for Entrepreneurs (SFE) Memo, a structured, iterative document where you lay out your theory of value (what's the problem, what's the solution, how do you make money), design experiments to test it, run those experiments, and write up what you learned. You'll revise the memo multiple times over the semester as your thinking sharpens and your experiments generate new evidence.

Alongside the memo, the course includes structured peer feedback sessions where you read and critique each other's work. You're graded on the quality of feedback you give, not just the memo you write, because learning to diagnose the strengths and weaknesses in someone else's strategy is itself a core skill. A student who discovers their idea won't work, and documents why with rigor and honesty, has learned as much as a student whose venture shows early traction. The course rewards learning, not just outcomes.

Grading / Course Administration

• Classroom discussion: 30%

• Peer feedback: 20%

• Imitation project: 20%

• Final project submission: 30%

Course Content Keywords

AI, Entrepreneurship, Strategy, Moats, Product Management, Entrepreneurial Finance, Building, Generative AI, Experimentation

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Overview:

How do industries take shape, and who gets to define them?

AI is transforming how work gets done. The circular economy is redefining how products are designed, used, and reused. Livestreaming and creator platforms are turning individuals into global media companies in real time. In these fast-evolving spaces, the rules of competition aren’t fixed; they are being written in real time.

This creates an opportunity. The most successful companies are not just adapting to change; they are actively shaping the industries they compete in.

This course is about learning how to do exactly that.

As digital technologies, ecosystems, and global interdependencies redefine competition, firms must do more than make smart initial choices. They must continuously adapt and, more importantly, influence the direction their industries take. That means understanding not just markets, but also partners, regulators, and the broader systems in which firms operate.

What will you learn?
• How to anticipate and shape where industries are going
• How to adapt strategy in real time as technologies, incentives, and competitors evolve
• How to win through collaboration, not just competition
• How to navigate non-market forces such as regulation, standards, and public opinion

What will you walk away with?
By the end of the course, you will have:
• A clear point of view on how your target industries are likely to evolve
• The ability to adapt a company’s strategy based on that perspective

Career Focus:
Consulting, corporate strategy, operating roles; also useful for prospective founders or investors interested in learning how to build points of view on how industries evolve

Grading / Course Administration:
50% Participation and 50% paper

Course Content Keywords:

strategy, industry evolution, strategic planning, disruption, change, future, foresight

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved

Overview:

The course explores the challenges and opportunities that firms face through the green transition, with a focus on green energy, corporate decarbonization, and climate entrepreneurship. It also addresses the physical sciences, economics, politics, and technologies behind climate change and the ways in which these factors shape the business environment. The goal is to provide a comprehensive perspective on the climate transition both for students who are already working in that space, as well as for those interested in learning about the current state of climate policy and business.

Career Focus:

The green transition depends on a range of professional career tracks, including finance, consulting, product management, entrepreneurship, and energy systems. The course is designed to help students in each of these areas by setting their experiences within a broader conceptual framework. For student with no background in climate change, the course provided a deep dive into the main topics they need to understand to be conversant in the issues.

Educational Objectives:

The course is designed to provide a solid grounding in the geophysics, economics, politics, and engineering considerations that are shaping the causes and responses to climate change. Students are encouraged to build their own narratives of how the green transition is likely to occur, and the implications it will have for business and society. These narratives provide and analytic lens for making strategic decisions related to climate risk and the energy transition.

Course Content and Organization:

The course is organized into four modules.

Module 1. The causes and policy response to climate change. It introduces the basic geophysical, economic, and societal context of climate change.

Module 2. The green energy transition. It focuses on the deployment of renewable energy, and the economic and political and strategic considerations that shape their adoption.

Module 3. Corporate decarbonization in the hard-to-abate sectors: transportation, industry, agriculture.

Module 4. Climate entrepreneurship, with a focus on cutting edge technologies that may disrupt our approaches to decarbonization.

Grading / Course Administration:

Class participation: 50%

Midterm quiz: 10%

Final paper: 40%

Course Content Keywords:

Climate change

Green technology

Climate strategy

Climate finance

Climate entrepreneurship’

Climate science

Overview:

Supply Chain Management (SCM) builds on aspects of the first-year Technology and Operations Management (RC TOM) course. However, whereas RC TOM focuses primarily on producing and developing products and services, SCM emphasizes managing product availability, especially in a context of rapid product proliferation, short product life cycles, and global networks of suppliers and customers. Hence, topics not examined in RC TOM such as inventory management, distribution economics, and demand forecasting are explored in depth in SCM.

SCM also differs from RC TOM in that RC TOM concentrates primarily on material and information flows within an organization, whereas SCM focuses on managing material and information flows across functional and organizational boundaries. Due to the boundary-spanning nature of supply chain management, the SCM course also has strong links to the first-year courses in marketing, leadership, finance, and strategy. The course emphasizes the "general manager's perspective" in managing supply chains. Cases in the course illustrate that barriers to integrating supply chains often relate to organizational issues (e.g., misaligned incentives or change management challenges) and operational execution problems (e.g., misplaced SKUs in a retail store) that fall squarely in the domain of the general manager. Numerous case protagonists and expert guests will join sessions throughout the semester to share their broader management perspectives.

Data-driven, analytical decision-making is often critical in supply chain management, and thus SCM also builds on aspects of the first-year Data Science and AI for Leaders (RC DSAIL) course. However, whereas RC DSAIL focuses primarily on mechanics and applications of particular data science techniques, SCM emphasizes how to deploy data science (analytics) capabilities in business operations and how employees can best leverage their own expertise and data science tools to improve business outcomes. The course makes clear that suitable information technology and appropriate use of analytical tools are necessary, but by no means sufficient, for supply chain management.

Career Focus:

This course is appropriate for students interested in pursuing careers in any management function (e.g., operations, marketing, finance) in firms that make, sell and/or distribute physical products, or in organizations (e.g., consulting firms, investment banks, private equity firms, software providers, transportation providers) that analyze, invest in, and/or offer products and services to those firms.

Educational Objectives:

The Supply Chain Management course comprises the following modules.

Module 1: Transportation and Network Design

This introductory module’s cases outline the basic elements of a logistics system and how they fit together. The materials cover topics such as transportation economics, supply chain network design, and the role of distributors in the efficient and effective storage and flow of goods and information in a supply chain. The module demonstrates the multiple faces of supply chain management—strategic, organizational, and tactical—and how they can be used to gain competitive advantage.

Module 2: Inventory Management

This module illustrates the various roles that inventory plays in the broader contexts of business strategy and financial performance. Sessions in the module highlight the significant costs of excess or insufficient inventory in a supply chain, and help students recognize that excessive or insufficient inventory is often a symptom of underlying problems that should be addressed. The module introduces analytical tools to help students make tactical inventory management decisions, and integrates such tools with more strategic decisions such as supply chain network design.

Module 3: Demand Forecasting & Planning

As the first two modules illustrate, one of the biggest challenges across various supply chain management functions stems from uncertainty about future product demand. This module provides students with two ways to address this uncertainty: (i) using analytical tools to reduce uncertainty via demand forecasting, and (ii) proactively planning for uncertainty.

Module 4: Aligning Incentives in Supply Chains

This module introduces formal ways to think about incentive alignment in supply chains. It also highlights the consequence of incentive misalignment and the benefits of superior incentives.

Module 5: Finance and Supply Chains

This module explores inventory management, and hence supply chains and operations broadly, from the perspective of an equity investor or lender.

Module 6: Integrative Module

In this module, we explore companies that are facing supply chain challenges or are introducing novel ways to address supply chain problems. This module surveys additional topics that are highly relevant to today’s supply chains, including supply chain disruption, sustainability, and how supply chain decisions may change in light of geopolitical and competitive considerations. Cases will continue to build on material covered in earlier modules.

Grading

Grading will be based on class participation, engagement, and an exam.

Course Content Keywords:

operations, supply chain, retail, general management, consumer goods, logistics, analytics, forecasting, data science

Copyright © 2026 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved