Rebecca Henderson is the John and Natty McArthur University Professor at Harvard University, where she has a joint appointment at the Harvard Business School in the General Management and Strategy units. Professor Henderson is also a research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Her work explores how organizations respond to large-scale technological shifts, most recently in regard to energy and the environment. She teaches Reimagining Capitalism in the MBA Program.
From 1998 to 2009, Professor Henderson was the Eastman Kodak Professor of Management at the Sloan School of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she ran the strategy group and taught courses in strategy, technology strategy, and sustainability. She received an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from MIT and a doctorate in business economics from Harvard.
Professor Henderson sits on the boards of Amgen and of IDEXX Laboratories, and she has worked with both members of the Fortune 100 and small, technology-orientated start-ups. She was retained by the U.S. Department of Justice in connection with the remedies phase of the Microsoft trial, and in 2001 she was named Teacher of the Year at the Sloan School. Her work has been published in a range of scholarly journals including Administrative Science Quarterly, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Strategic Management Journal, Management Science, Research Policy, The RAND Journal of Economics, and Organization Science.
Her most recent publication is Leading Sustainable Change: An Organizational Perspective, edited jointly with Ranjay Gulati and Michael Tushman, and published by the Oxford University Press.
Artificial intelligence promises to greatly increase the efficiency of the economy. But it may have an even larger impact on the economy by serving as a new general-purpose “method of invention” that can reshape the nature of the innovation process and the organization of R&D. This exploratory essay considers this possibility in two interrelated ways. First, we review the history of artificial intelligence, focusing in particular on the potential for recent developments in “deep learning” to serve as a general-purpose method of invention. Second, we consider some of the implications of this possibility, with a focus on both likely changes in the organization of the innovation process as well as the policy and institutional responses that may be required. We suggest that policies which encourage transparency and sharing of core datasets across both public and private actors can stimulate a higher level of innovation-oriented competition and a higher level of research productivity going forward.
Climate change. Income inequality. Institutional collapse. Sustainable Business Strategy is a flexible, 3 week, highly-interactive online course designed to provide participants with the tools they need to build thriving businesses while simultaneously playing a major role in solving some of the big problems of our time. Sustainable Business Strategy is offered via HBX, the digital learning initiative from Harvard Business School.
This note provides general information about climate change and its implications for business. Included is an overview of climate change science and a number of its impacts, including rising sea levels, changing weather patterns and extreme weather, pressure on water and food, political and security risks, human health risks, and impact on wildlife and ecosystems. Next, responses to climate change are outlined, including improvements in energy efficiency, moving away from fossil fuels, changes in land use and agriculture practices, and geoengineering. The note concludes with the debate over who should pay and how much should be spent to mitigate and adapt to climate change and the implications for the private sector.
In the latest paper for the Initiative on 21st Century Capitalism, Rebecca Henderson and Karthik Ramanna, professors at Harvard, look to business leaders to ask the important question: Do managers have a role to play in sustaining free and fair capitalism? The authors argue that corporations and their managers have a special duty to maintain the conditions that sustain capitalism when operating in sparsely attended political processes where competing voices are seldom heard. In such scenarios, managers have a responsibility to advance the interests of the capitalist system as a whole, even if this entails acting at the expense of corporate profits.
Can a business case be made for acting sustainably? This is a difficult question to answer precisely, largely because there is no generally accepted definition of the term “sustainability”. Is it acting sustainably to protect the human rights of the firm’s workforce? To invest in education in local communities? To switch to renewable power? All of these actions might improve social welfare, and some of them might improve profitability but they are very different, and the business case for each of them is similarly likely to look quite different. Here I begin to explore the issue by focusing on a more limited question, namely whether a business case be made for acting in an environmentally sustainable way, which I define as acting in any way that reduce a firm’s environmental footprint.
