Faculty & Research
Karen Mills

Karen Mills

Senior Fellow

Senior Fellow

General Management
Entrepreneurial Management
+1 (617) 496-6556
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Karen Mills
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(617) 496-6556
Featured Work Publications Research Summary

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Books

Book Chapters
Book Chapters

Journal Articles
Journal Articles

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Working Papers

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Cases and Teaching Materials

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Karen Gordon Mills is a Senior Fellow at Harvard Business School and a leading authority on U.S. competitiveness, entrepreneurship, and innovation. She served in President Barack Obama’s Cabinet as the Administrator of the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) from 2009 until 2013, and was a member of the President’s National Economic Council. At SBA, she led a team of more than 3,000 employees and managed a loan guarantee portfolio of over $100 billion. At the height of the Great Recession, she took steps that led to record-breaking years for SBA lending and investments in growth capital. Additionally, Mills’ efforts helped small businesses create regional economic clusters, gain access to early-stage capital, boost exports, and tap into government and commercial supply chains. She is the author of the book Fintech, Small Business & the American Dream: How Technology is Transforming Lending and Shaping a New Era of Small Business Opportunity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), as well as numerous other publications on fintech, innovation policy, and the supply chain economy.

Mills is a venture capitalist and the President of MMP Group. She is the Vice Chair of Envoy, an immigration services provider, and a Director of several Churchill Capital entities. She is also a Director of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and Chair of the Advisory Committee for the Private Capital Research Institute (PCRI). Mills is a Member of the Harvard Corporation and a past Vice Chair of the Harvard Overseers.

Mills earned an AB in economics from Harvard University and an MBA from Harvard Business School, where she was a Baker Scholar. She received the U.S. Department of the Navy’s Distinguished Public Service Award for her work in innovation, and is a frequent guest on radio and news outlets, including SiriusXM, Bloomberg TV, Yahoo Finance and CNBC, with recent articles in American Banker, Fortune, Inc., and the Harvard Business Review.

Featured Work
Fintech, Small Business & the American Dream: How Technology Is Transforming Lending and Shaping a New Era of Small Business Opportunity

 

Fintech, Small Business & the American Dream describes the needs of small businesses for capital and demonstrates how technology—novel data sources, artificial intelligence, machine learning—will transform the small business lending market. This market has been plagued by frictions: it is hard for a lender to determine which small businesses are creditworthy and it is difficult for business owners to understand their own cash flow and prospects. Now the fintech innovation cycle is at an inflection point—new streams of data have the power to illuminate the opaque nature of a small business’s finances. The playing field is wide open, with technology companies like Amazon and Square, new fintech entrepreneurs, and banks—small and large—vying for a position. Fintech, Small Business & the American Dream grapples with the broad significance of small business to the economy, the historical role of credit markets, the dynamics of innovation cycles, and the policy implications for regulation.
Building small business utopia: how artificial intelligence and Big Data can increase small business success
Small business lending has remained unchanged for decades, laden with frictions and barriers that prevent many small businesses from accessing the capital they need to succeed. Financial technology, or “fintech,” promises to change this trajectory. In 2010, new fintech firms emerged to combat the market gaps in small business lending. These firms rely on Big Data and artificial intelligence to build automated underwriting processes and create a more streamlined customer experience. Since the initial fintech boom, incumbent banks and Big Tech platforms have followed suit and developed new products and services to better support small business customers. The data-driven technology used to optimize underwriting can also power a dashboard for small business owners—one that offers visibility into their cash flows and helps them run their businesses. This product-service ecosystem, which we call “Small Business Utopia,” has the potential to transform the world of small business by providing capital and insights to ensure these businesses can prosper and contribute to economic growth, productivity, and innovation.
The Servicification of the U.S. Economy: The Role of Startups versus Incumbent Firms
Over the last few decades, the U.S. economy has exhibited a significant shift from manufacturing towards services. This transition has been particularly prominent in an important subcategory of services industries that drives innovation and employs many high-wage workers: Supply Chain Traded Services. In this chapter, we explore the role of startups versus incumbent firms in driving the transition from manufacturing to Supply Chain Traded Services between 1998 and 2015.
Creating ‘Smart’ Policy to Promote Entrepreneurship and Innovation
The heterogeneity of America’s small businesses has led to some confusion and missteps in policy circles regarding the best strategies to promote entrepreneurship and innovation. We describe three policy areas: improving access to capital, delivering entrepreneurship advice and education, and creating entrepreneurial ecosystems, and show how policy solutions that drive innovation differ from support for Main Street small businesses.
How AI Could Help Small Businesses
As technology opens the doors to vast troves of data, opportunities are emerging to create new insights on a small business’s health and prospects. Insights from this data have the potential to resolve two defining issues that have faced lenders and borrowers in the sector: heterogeneity—the fact that all small businesses are different, making it difficult to extrapolate from one example to the next—and information opacity, the fact that it is hard to know what is really going on inside a small business.
The State of Small Business Lending: Credit Access during the Recovery and How Technology May Change the Game
Small businesses are core to America’s economic competitiveness. Not only do they employ half of the nation’s private sector workforce – about 120 million people – but since 1995 they have created approximately two‐thirds of the net new jobs in our country. Yet in recent years, small businesses have been slow to recover from a recession and credit crisis that hit them especially hard. This lag has prompted the question, “Is there a credit gap in small business lending?”  

This paper compiles and analyzes the current state of access to bank capital for small business from the best available sources. We explore both the cyclical impact of the recession on small business and access to credit, and several structural issues in that impede the full recovery of bank credit markets for smaller loans.
How Companies Can Help Rebuild America’s Common Resources
In cities and metros across the United States, leadership from government, business, labor, education, and the nonprofit sector have started to work together across sectors to bolster communal resources. These cross-sector collaborations are diverse in nature, and often are responses to specific local conditions. Furthermore, they are pushing the boundaries of traditional public-private partnerships: the engagements are driven neither by civic duty or short-term transactional benefit, like they often were in the past. Instead, businesses see them as in their longer-term strategic interests.
Invested in Detroit
April 11, 2018 - Karen Mills leads a discussion between Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan and JPMorgan Chase's President and CEO Jamie Dimon and Head of Corporate Responsibility Peter Scher for a discussion on cross-sector collaboration to drive economic opportunity in America's cities. The discussion, which was hosted by the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum at the Harvard Kennedy School's Institute of Politics, looks at how partnerships like the one between JPMorgan Chase and the City of Detroit are succeeding at addressing community challenges and creating pathways to greater economic opportunity for individuals and families.
Growth and Shared Prosperity
In June 2015, 73 chief executives, mayors, governors, university presidents, economists, and thought leaders from across the political spectrum gathered at Harvard Business School to work on a question of deep and growing concern in the United States: How can our nation continue to grow while also providing a path to prosperity for more Americans? This briefing shares the highlights of the group’s deliberations.
Books
Book Chapters
Journal Articles
Working Papers
Cases and Teaching Materials
Other Publications and Materials
Research Summary
Fintech, Small Business & the American Dream: How Technology Is Transforming Lending and Shaping a New Era of Small Business Opportunity
Fintech, Small Business & the American Dream describes the needs of small businesses for capital and demonstrates how technology—novel data sources, artificial intelligence, machine learning—will transform the small business lending market. This market has been plagued by frictions: it is hard for a lender to determine which small businesses are creditworthy and it is difficult for business owners to understand their own cash flow and prospects. Now the fintech innovation cycle is at an inflection point—new streams of data have the power to illuminate the opaque nature of a small business’s finances. The playing field is wide open, with technology companies like Amazon and Square, new fintech entrepreneurs, and banks—small and large—vying for a position. Fintech, Small Business & the American Dream grapples with the broad significance of small business to the economy, the historical role of credit markets, the dynamics of innovation cycles, and the policy implications for regulation.
Building Small Business Utopia: How Artificial Intelligence and Big Data Can Increase Small Business Success
Small business lending has remained unchanged for decades, laden with frictions and barriers that prevent many small businesses from accessing the capital they need to succeed. Financial technology, or “fintech,” promises to change this trajectory. In 2010, new fintech firms emerged to combat the market gaps in small business lending. These firms rely on Big Data and artificial intelligence to build automated underwriting processes and create a more streamlined customer experience. Since the initial fintech boom, incumbent banks and Big Tech platforms have followed suit and developed new products and services to better support small business customers. The data-driven technology used to optimize underwriting can also power a dashboard for small business owners—one that offers visibility into their cash flows and helps them run their businesses. This product-service ecosystem, which we call “Small Business Utopia,” has the potential to transform the world of small business by providing capital and insights to ensure these businesses can prosper and contribute to economic growth, productivity, and innovation.
The Supply Chain Economy: A New Industry Categorization for Understanding Innovation in Services
An active debate has centered on the importance of manufacturing for driving innovation in the U.S. economy. This paper offers an alternative framework that focuses on the role of suppliers of goods and services (the “supply chain economy”) in national performance. We identify three conceptual attributes of suppliers that make them important for innovation: they produce specialized inputs; have more downstream linkages with other industries; and benefit especially from co-locating with their customers, creating externalities. Using the 2002 Benchmark Input-Output Accounts, we estimate a new industry categorization that separates supply chain (SC) industries (i.e., those that sell primarily to businesses or government) from business-to-consumer (B2C) industries (i.e., those that sell primarily to consumers). We find that the supply chain economy is a distinct and large segment of the economy that includes primarily service providers. The SC industries, especially traded services, have higher average wages than B2C industries. The supply chain economy also has higher innovative activity as captured by the concentration of the vast majority of STEM jobs (primarily in traded services) and patents (in manufacturing). Finally, we find that employment in the economy has evolved from manufacturing into two distinct types of services (1998–2015): SC Traded Services (with the highest STEM intensity and wages) versus B2C Main Street (with the lowest STEM intensity and wages).
The Servicification of the U.S. Economy: The Role of Startups versus Incumbent Firms
Over the last few decades, the U.S. economy has exhibited a significant shift from manufacturing towards services. This transition has been particularly prominent in an important subcategory of services industries that drives innovation and employs many high-wage workers: Supply Chain Traded Services (Delgado and Mills, 2020). These industries provide specialized service inputs to organizations and are characterized by high upstreamness, which allow innovations to cascade down to other buyer industries. In this chapter, we explore the role of startups versus incumbent firms in driving the transition from manufacturing to Supply Chain Traded Services between 1998 and 2015. Using the Longitudinal Business Database of the U.S. Census Bureau, we find that startups experienced a large decline in Supply Chain Traded Services, both in terms of entry of new firms and growth of young firms. Instead, job growth in this sector has been led by established firms: the transformation of incumbent manufacturing firms towards services (e.g., Intel), and the growth of incumbent Supply Chain Traded Service firms (e.g., Microsoft). To complement our empirical findings, we discuss potential barriers for entrepreneurial firms, and illustrate the servicification efforts of several established firms. We conclude by offering broad policy implications.
Creating ‘Smart’ Policy to Promote Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Entrepreneurship is a key to unlocking innovation and fostering regional and national economic productivity. Extensive studies demonstrate that small and young firms contribute to innovation and employment growth. But which of the many types of small firms are responsible? Of the over 30 million U.S. small businesses, most are sole proprietorships or local Main Street shops, and only a small number are high-growth businesses. The heterogeneity of America’s small businesses has led to some confusion and missteps in policy circles regarding the best strategies to promote entrepreneurship and innovation. We describe three policy areas: improving access to capital, delivering entrepreneurship advice and education, and creating entrepreneurial ecosystems, and show how policy solutions that drive innovation differ from support for Main Street small businesses.
The State of Small Business Lending: Innovation and Technology and the Implications for Regulation
Small businesses were among the hardest hit in the Great Recession, accounting for more than 60% of the total jobs lost. The economic crisis was one focused on the banking sector, which is one reason for the disproportionately high impact on America’s small businesses, which tend to be heavily credit dependent. While some aspects of the economy have recovered in the years since, small businesses have struggled, primarily due to a lingering credit gap that is the result of banks being less likely to make the smaller dollar loans—those less than $250,000—that small firms (more than 70%) seek. A rapidly growing financial technology (fintech) sector has quickly stepped in to fill this gap, and incumbent banks are exploring a variety of partnership strategies with the new entrants. Yet, while the much needed increase in sources for financing has been welcome by small businesses, these innovative fintech lenders have sparked concerns around transparency and the high costs charged to borrowers. These concerns are exacerbated by a “spaghetti soup” of regulators, where no one federal entity has oversight, and protections around small business borrowing slip through the cracks. This paper takes a detailed look at the current state of small business lending, the causes for the persistent low-dollar loan gap, the solutions being driven by innovative fintech lenders, and the key concerns around oversight and regulation. Finally, our objective is to provide regulatory recommendations that will protect small business borrowers and not dampen the innovation that has proven so promising for filling the gap in small business access to credit.
The State of Small Business Lending: Credit Access During the Recovery and How Technology May Change the Game

Small businesses are core to America's economic competitiveness. Not only do they employ half of the nation’s private sector workforce—about 120 million people—but since 1995 they have created approximately two-thirds of the net new jobs in our country. Yet in recent years, small businesses have been slow to recover from a recession and credit crisis that hit them especially hard. This lag has prompted the question, “Is there a credit gap in small business lending?” This paper compiles and analyzes the current state of access to bank capital for small business from the best available sources. We explore both the cyclical impact of the recession on small business and access to credit, and several structural issues that impede the full recovery of bank credit markets for smaller loans.

Growth and Shared Prosperity

In June 2015, 73 chief executives, mayors, governors, university presidents, economists, and thought leaders from across the political spectrum gathered at Harvard Business School to work on a question of deep and growing concern in the United States: How can our nation continue to grow while also providing a path to prosperity for more Americans? This briefing shares the highlights of the group’s deliberations.

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