William Kerr is the D’Arbeloff Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. Bill is the co-director of Harvard’s Managing the Future of Work initiative and the faculty chair of the Launching New Ventures program for executive education. Bill is a recipient of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation’s Prize Medal for Distinguished Research in Entrepreneurship and Harvard's Distinction in Teaching award.
Bill’s recent book is The Gift of Global Talent: How Migration Shapes Business, Economy & Society (2018). It explores the global race for talent and how countries and businesses compete for high-skilled migrants. The book reveals how immigration has transformed U.S. innovation, reshaped the economy through the rise of talent clusters and superstar firms, and influenced society at large in positive and adverse ways. The book argues that America, and the world, can get more out of global talent flows with sensible reforms.
The Managing the Future of Work project considers the unprecedented set of challenges and opportunities presented to businesses, including rapid technological revolutions, shifting global product and labor markets, aging workforces, and growing skills gaps. These forces change the ways that businesses compete with each other and engage workers. This multi-faculty project identifies how companies, schools, workers and the public sector can come together to manage the challenging transitions ahead as the nature of work is radically transformed. The initiative produces leading research on these themes and disseminates to broader audiences through platforms like the MFW podcast series.
Bill’s broader research centers on how companies and economies explore new opportunities and generate growth. He considers the leadership and resources necessary to identify, launch and sustain dynamic and enduring organizations. He works with companies worldwide on the development of new ventures and transformations for profitable growth. He also advises governments about investments in the innovative capacities of their nations.
Bill and his family live in Lexington, MA. They enjoy outdoor sports and trail running, are active members of their local church, and maintain close ties to his wife's home country of Finland. Bill grew up in Alabama and remains a passionate college football fan.
The global race for talent is on, with countries and businesses competing for the best and brightest. Foreign talent has transformed U.S. science and engineering, reshaped the economy, and influenced society at large. But America is bogged down in thorny debates on immigration policy, and the world around the United States is rapidly catching up, especially China and India. The future is quite uncertain, and the global talent puzzle deserves close examination. This book combines insights and lessons from business practice, government policy, and individual decision-making to give voice to data and ideas that should drive the next wave of policy and business practice.
The nature of work is changing. As companies grapple with forces—such as rapid technological change, shifting global product and labor markets, evolving regulatory regimes, outsourcing, and the fast emergence of the gig economy—they must overcome challenges and tap opportunities to attract, retain, and improve the productivity of their human assets. And they must do so in partnership with policymakers, educators, and nonprofits as well as in collaboration with other companies. Harvard Business School’s Project on Managing the Future of Work pursues research that business and policy leaders can put into action to navigate this complex landscape.
Immigration policy is one of the most contentious public policy issues in the United States today. High-skilled immigrants represent an increasing share of the U.S. workforce, particularly in science and engineering fields. These immigrants affect economic growth, patterns of trade, education choices, and the earnings of workers with different types of skills. The chapters in this volume go beyond the traditional question of how the inflow of foreign workers affects native employment and earnings to explore effects on innovation and productivity, wage inequality across skill groups, the behavior of multinational firms, firm-level dynamics of entry and exit, and the nature of comparative advantage across countries.
Globalization has forever changed the business landscape. High-impact entrepreneurship is worldwide, and many start-up ventures and large company initiatives launch today with a presence in multiple countries from day one. This Reading describes the business models that global ventures pursue and differences in the extent to which these companies harness globalization directly into their core operations. Examples include Airbnb, Entrepreneurial Finance Lab, Upwork, Rocket Internet, and many more. The second half of the reading considers the managerial challenges that these venture face and best practices for leaders, as these ventures often look great on paper but struggle in execution.
For decades, established businesses have struggled to lead the commercialization of breakthrough innovations and to transform their organizations and industries to capture the value that can be enabled by these new technologies and innovations. While most executives recognize that the ability to lead innovation is a core strategic driver of their firm’s success in the future, the capabilities required to execute are woefully lacking. This Reading introduces the challenges that large companies have consistently confronted in this area, provides examples of large companies that have overcome these challenges with careful and effective management, and illustrates how some of the best practices from the start-up world are being applied in large companies operating at the frontier of innovation.
Financing strategy is critical for high growth ventures. This reading introduces students to the key issues involved in the financing of entrepreneurial enterprises. It describes the intimate connection between business models and the financing needs of ventures, provides an overview of the entrepreneurial finance landscape and the traits of various financiers, and identifies critical issues faced by entrepreneurs in their financing choices, such as whether VC investment aligns with their personal motivations. The web-linked tool contains six Interactive Tools: Calculating a Cumulative Cash Flow Curve, Asset Intensity Ratio, Building a Cap Table, How Investor Expectations and Target Returns Drive Company Ownership, Payouts from Simple Equity and Convertible Investments, and Seed Note Ownership and Value.
