In February 2023, U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo weighed signing off on a Notice of Funding Opportunity ("NOFO") with at least one unconventional provision: a pre-application ("pre-app") to the actual application for parts of $39 billion in direct semiconductor manufacturing incentives. The funding had been made available through the U.S. Department of Commerce by the CHIPS and Science Act ("CHIPS") passed a few months earlier. Her team had also proposed additional measures for the NOFO. They'd added upside sharing provisions to align incentives. They'd included funding milestones so that only awardees making progress would receive additional funds. And they'd drafted a rolling process, so apps didn't have to be evaluated all at once. Each mechanism, along with the pre-apps, they hoped, would help regain U.S. technological leadership while protecting taxpayer funds. Raimondo would have to decide whether the NOFO as conceived set the stage to do precisely that.
"Storrowed" is an exercise to help participants raise their capacity and curiosity for generative AI. It focuses on generative AI for problem understanding and ideation, but can be adapted for use more broadly. Participants use generative AI tools to understand a problem and then to arrive at ideas for solving it. The exercise begins with the following introduction: "A problem vexed Boston, Massachusetts, and its drivers. Trucks got stuck under the bridges on the city's Storrow Drive so often that this predicament even had a name, 'Storrowing' or getting 'Storrowed'. Efforts to date, including signage, social media campaigns, and fines, among other measures, had not put an end to Storrowing. One driver - dismayed and delayed on the way to work behind one such run-in - wondered, 'What would AI have to say about why this keeps happening?'" The exercise is accompanied by a game and can be run in teams; the best prompts keep the teams' trucks from "Storrowing."
This case reviews Saint Paul Mayor Melvin Carter's decision to involve the community in the process of hiring his cabinet members. Rather than relying on an executive recruiting firm or choosing cabinet heads from his own network, Carter recruited 100 community members and asked them to vet, screen, and interview candidates for ten city directorships, with Carter reserving the right to make final decisions. While his choices aligned with the panels for seven positions, they diverged for the remaining three. In January 2018, as Carter prepared to announce his decisions, he hoped his choices would not undermine belief in the participatory hiring process and his credibility as a mayor who valued community voices.
In May 2022, the Seoul Metropolitan Government (SMG) launched the pilot of Metaverse Seoul, a government-run metaverse. SMG had delivered a virtual version of Seoul's mayor's office. The team aimed to gain insights as they worked towards building a broad, immersive, online government platform. They'd invited citizen feedback in many ways, including via a virtual mailbox and bulletin board placed prominently around the corner from where an avatar of the mayor could greet visitors and preside over gatherings. Now, public comments were coming in and the team had to decide what to make of them.
Nora Khaldi had built a technology "to unlock the power of nature" in the service of extending human lifespan and improving health, and now in April 2020 was debating telling her Board of Directors she wanted to put on ice some of her discoveries. Nuritas, the company she founded in 2014, leveraged artificial intelligence (AI) to find specific peptides―short chains of amino acids―among the trillions that exist in nature and target them for preventing or treating the onset of disease and preserving health for longer. Khaldi worried that getting certain products to market was taking too long and about the potential distraction caused by doing too many projects to serve very distinct industries. Underlying this was her concern that cash would run short if they tried to do it all. She weighed shutting down Nuritas's promising early-stage pharmaceutical projects―including one aimed at treating Glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer―to focus on consumer-oriented approaches, like a supplement to improve muscle health and reduce the physical signs of aging. Khaldi contemplated telling her team to cease most of their pharmaceutical work, at least for the time being, and eliminate roles linked to that part of the business.
Founded in 2020 by Jewel Burks Solomon and her partners, Barry Givens and Justin Dawkins, Collab Capital was a new investment firm built on two pillars: first, it would identify and support ventures founded by Black entrepreneurs, a group underrepresented in venture-financed entrepreneurship. Second, Solomon and her partners had developed a novel financial instrument that incorporated both profit-sharing and equity to offer an alternative to traditional venture capital (VC) for startups. They believed their approach offered venture-level returns for investors while also closing a critical funding gap for Black entrepreneurs. But Limited Partners (LPs) were not yet convinced.
In 2017, Newsha Ghaeli and Mariana Matus were deciding whether to leave their labs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, put other job opportunities aside, and dive full-time into founding a wastewater analysis start-up, Biobot. Ghaeli, an architect, and Matus, a computational biologist, had been turning sewage into information about "population health" and now had dreams of turning the data encoded in urine and stool into a viable and impactful business. In plainer terms, they planned to "tap into what you flush down the toilet every day." They'd been told not to. They'd been told their idea was too broad and their skills too narrow. They'd been told they had no defensible intellectual property and limited scalability. They'd been advised to choose other startups instead, and knew, as immigrants on temporary visas, if they failed at this venture, they might even have to leave the country. Despite the many hurdles and objections, Ghaeli and Matus felt mostly at ease about moving ahead. Were they missing something? Or was everyone else?
How many police officer positions to fund? In August 2020, the question facing St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter, which might have seemed routine to another mayor at another time in another place, was anything but. A pandemic had rendered the city some $19-$34 million short for 2021. Advocates across the country (and nearby) had pointed to a likely pool for budget cuts: police departments. The May 2020 killing of George Floyd, a Black man, in neighboring Minneapolis by a police officer there, had sparked calls nationwide to "defund the police" and pushback to those calls. What would St. Paul's mayor do? For Carter, the question was about much more than shifting money. He had swept into office in 2018 promising equity. He had spoken from experience about what it felt like to be pulled over by police because he was Black. He had committed to, and then undertaken with his police chief, use of force reforms in 2018. He had monitored closely an increase in neighborhood shootings and homicides in 2019 and declared that public safety must be "our first and highest ambition upon which all other dreams must be built." Carter wanted nothing short of a new public safety framework that would include-but be much more expansive than-simply responding to emergencies, and that would be rooted in community. "I see a clear vision of the future," said Carter, "but transitioning to get there is an open question."
By April 7, 2020, over 1.4 million people worldwide had contracted the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). Governments raced to curb the spread of COVID-19 by scaling up testing, quarantining those infected, and tracing their possible contacts. It had taken Singapore's Government Technology Agency (GovTech) and Ministry of Health (MOH) all of eight weeks to develop the world's first nationwide deployment of a Bluetooth-based contact tracing system, TraceTogether, and deploy it in an attempt to slow the spread of COVID-19. From late January to mid-March 2020, GovTech's Jason Bay and his team raced to create a technology that would supplement the work of Singapore's human contact tracers. Days after its launch, Singapore's foreign minister announced plans to open source the technology. Now, in early April, TraceTogether was a beta for the world. Whether the system would really help in Singapore, and whether other countries should adopt it was still a wide-open question.
Among the many competing definitions of entrepreneurship, the one adopted in The Entrepreneurial Manager at HBS was authored by Howard Stevenson in the 1980s and elaborated on in the decades since. Stevenson provided a managerial take on the term; he described entrepreneurship as a distinct approach to management. That approach is the subject of this brief note. The note provides his definition of entrepreneurship ("the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled") and six domains that differentiate entrepreneurial managers from administrative managers.
This is the course overview note for "The Entrepreneurial Manager," taught in the first year at Harvard Business School. Students will learn how to be opportunity-driven managers and how to lead under uncertainty. They'll learn how to identify opportunities, how to design and develop integrated operating models to pursue those opportunities, how to resource those activities amidst uncertainty, and, ultimately, how (and if) to scale them. The note covers the motivation for the course, historical and contemporary, and the course structure.
James "Hondo" Geurts, the Acquisition Executive for U.S. Special Operations Command was in the middle of his Senate confirmation hearing in 2017 to become Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisition. Overseeing acquisitions in one of the most secretive parts of the U.S. military, Geurts had founded SOFWERX, an open platform to diversify and speed the rate of new ideas into Navy SEALs, Army Special Forces, and the like. His approach helped source the idea for the EZ-Fly, a hoverboard, from a YouTube video. At his confirmation hearing, the Senators' questions had a common theme: How should things like SOFWERX and protypes like the EZ-Fly find a place within the Navy writ large? How would Geurts's experience running an innovative procurement effort for U.S. Special Forces units enable him to change a much larger-and much more rigid-organization like the U.S. Navy?
Nimit Sawhney scrolled through the tweet stream on his phone, unsure of what to make of it on August 6, 2018 or how to respond. Voatz, the Boston-based startup he co-founded and led, provided a mobile-voting platform. In March of 2018, had successfully piloted the new technology to enable U.S. servicemembers stationed abroad to vote securely in West Virginia's primary election. Two West Virginia counties had participated in the first test. Thirteen people voted from their mobile phones, a much more convenient alternative than the other options available to service members abroad. The very first West Virginia voter to use the app called it "slick." Two dozen West Virginia counties were preparing to make mobile-voting via Voatz an option for their citizens living abroad in the general elections slated for November. But the August tweets threw this plan into question. Kevin Beaumont tweeting as @GossiTheDog retweeted a CNN article about Voatz and the upcoming November election with his own commentary: "This is going to backfire." He accused Voatz of operating with out-of-date security for remote logins. It would get worse from there. And Sawhney's task was to figure out how to make it better.
Dai Wei and his co-founders grew Beijing-based ofo from a school-based startup to a bike-share behemoth in a matter of months, topped an all-out market-share battle fueled with almost $1 billion in venture capital, provided 2 billion bicycle rides, soaked up the majority of the bike manufacturing capacity in all of China, and then, in July of 2017, hit pause. The proximate reason for halting their purchase of new bicycles was a supply imbalance: ofo had many more bikes on their way than they did the smart-locks that allowed their customers to unlock them with their cell-phones. But the breather would also give ofo's leaders a chance to re-assess their plans for the rest of the year. For how long, to what end, and at what cost, to wage their market-share battle with main rival, Mobike? How aggressively to pursue their international expansion and what adjustments, if any, to make from their model in dozens of Chinese cities? And what to do about the concerns from government officials that ofo's dockless bikes and those of dozens of competitors were creating hazards on city streets? Wei and four schoolmates at Peking University had launched ofo on their campus with 1000 bikes in fall 2015. Since then, they had deployed 6.5 million. The question now was how many more?
By the time Dan Doctoroff, CEO of Sidewalk Labs, began hosting a Reddit "Ask Me Anything" session in January 2018, he had only nine months remaining to convince the people of Toronto, their government representatives, and presumably his parent company Alphabet, Inc., that Sidewalk Labs' plan to construct "the first truly 21st-century city" on the Canadian city's waterfront was a sound one. Along with much excitement and optimism, strains of concern had emerged since Doctoroff and partners first announced their intentions for a city "built from the internet up" in Toronto's Quayside district. As Doctoroff prepared for yet another milestone in a year of planning and community engagement, it was almost certain that of the many questions headed his way, digital privacy would be among them.
Pittsburgh's mayor had been among the first to welcome self-driving vehicles, but was now one of many needing to react after a pedestrian fatality involving an autonomous Uber in Arizona. He had originally preferred to roll out "the red carpet" instead of the "red tape". Now he found himself needing to balance technological advancement and the city's economic trajectory against public health and safety concerns and, simply, citizens' fears. Post-Arizona, should he allow AV firms to double down on experimentation? When it came to testing new technology, how safe was safe enough?
Shield AI's quadcopter - with no pilot and no flight plan - could clear a building and outpace human warfighters by almost five minutes. This was not to say that it was better than the warfighters or would replace their jobs, but it was evidence that autonomous robots deployed in this fashion could keep up with the pace of operators, serve as a force multiplier, and help protect civilian and service member lives. But was it evidence that the Shield AI team should ask their newest potential customer for a contract 50-60 times more than their only two contracts to date? Would asking for what a system of coordinated, exploring robots really cost - $50 to $60 million - scare off their U.S. government customer? No one would blink if Lockheed Martin, Boeing, or other large defense companies proposed a $60 million effort to do the same, but would it make Shield AI, barely two years past founding, look arrogant, ignorant, or both?
James "Hondo" Geurts, the Acquisition Executive for U.S. Special Operations Command was in the middle of his Senate confirmation hearing in 2017 to become Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisition. The questions had a common theme: how would Geurts's experience running an innovative procurement effort for U.S. Special Forces units enable him to change a much larger-and much more rigid-organization like the U.S. Navy? In one of the most secretive parts of the U.S. military, Geurts founded an open platform called SOFWERX to speed the rate of ideas to Navy SEALs, Army Special Forces, and the like. His team even sourced the idea for a hoverboard from a YouTube video. But how should things like SOFWERX and protypes like the EZ-Fly find a place within the Navy writ large?
Shaun Abrahamson and Stonly Baptiste aimed to invest in what they called "urbantech superheroes." At Urban Us, the seed-stage urban technology-focussed venture capital firm the two started in 2012, they looked for startups innovating around the future of cities. By 2017, they had assessed over 700 potential deals. Each one required a go/no-go decision, and four along the way were no different in that regrad. Of Remix, SeamlessDocs, Starcity, and One Concern, which ones to back? Setting aside the question for the moment of why urbantech startups needed superpowers, which of these possessed them?