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In the summer of 2019 in New Delhi, S K Shahi and his daughter, Meenakshi, faced a difficult problem. India had 19 centers of their non-profit, the Center for Social Responsibility and Leadership. Also called the 'Super 30' program, this offered free training for India's rigorous engineering entrance exam, the Joint Entrance Examination, to 30 - or sometimes 50 or 100 - high school graduates, selected by merit. Shahi and Meenakshi ran these centers using the corporate social responsibility funds donated by large state-owned companies in India, and some private companies. They had been operational for over a decade, with alumni working in academia, top tech companies, and education, having graduated from India's best colleges. They now had a difficult decision to make: should they expand in large metropolis cities - New Delhi; Kanpur; Mumbai - that would attract talented youth from all over India? Or else, given India's remote geographies and uneven distribution of income and educational benefits, was it best to expand to these tough regions to help those who most needed it? An additional source of concern was the operational and logistical cost of running centers in different parts of the country. What was the best way forward: city or town, urban or remote? New Delhi or Kashmir?

The case explores the strategic decision of global non-profit startup accelerator MassChallenge on whether to pursue a for-profit spinoff, discussing: (1) the costs and benefits of this decision, (2) how best to manage the risks of the decision, and (3) alternative pathways to ensure business sustainability and success.

Gavi has helped immunize over 760 million children in the world's poorest countries over the past 20 years saving 13 million lives. How should Gavi respond to the need for a vaccine for the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic?

India's start-up ecosystem is amongst the largest globally, with a variety of funding options from angel investors, venture capital and corporate venture capital to debt. Classic consumer focused start-ups which look to leverage technology have been able to raise significant amounts of capital but the situation is more challenging for deep science and technology focused startups. This note focuses on these issues and the factors behind them.

In 2019, entrepreneur Juan Carlos Castilla-Rubio was developing a project he hoped could generate and share wealth from the natural resources of the Amazon without destroying those resources. His idea, called Earth Bank of Codes (EBC), would create a library of the genomic codes of all known species that could be tapped for discovery and innovation, from new medical interventions to more efficient manufacturing processes. He proposed to use blockchain technology to make the data both accessible and trackable so that its use could be monitored. Castilla-Rubio envisioned a time when a company in the U.S. could access a biological asset from the Peruvian Amazon, develop and commercialize a product based on the asset, and have a fraction of the resulting sales land directly in the bank account of various beneficiaries, including the Peruvian government and indigenous communities. Now he was facing major decisions about how to structure EBC to achieve his goals. Should he start at the top and build partnerships with national governments and inter-governmental organizations as the cornerstone of EBC? Or would it be better to forge ahead with a few stakeholders in an entrepreneurial project?

El Sistema explores an NGO that changes the life of thousands of young people in Venezuela and around the world through musical education.

Alibaba's Rural Taobao initiative had been launched in 2014 as a public service initiative to increase e-commerce adoption in China's remote rural areas. In the first two iterations of the initiative, dubbed "1.0" and "2.0", Alibaba had partnered with local businesses and young returnees to operate village stations. Village stations served as logistical and educational hubs to help villagers make online purchases. Despite significant growth in sales through village stations, the business model was operating at a loss, and competitors JD and Pinduoduo were growing quickly, threatening to challenge Alibaba by claiming the rural e-commerce markets. Bill Wang, the head of the initiative, was tasked with designing and implementing the next model for Alibaba's future expansion into rural areas. The decision centers around whether Alibaba should copy the successes of competitors JD and Pinduoduo, escalate commitment to its original value proposition (hands-on service to villagers), or embrace an entirely new model. The case highlights the competing pressures of financial performance, CSR and corporate mission, government relations, and long-term competitive positioning that are common to major strategic decisions.

Trust: Creating the Foundation for Entrepreneurship in Developing Countries is a four-chapter book with an introduction published by Berrett-Koehler Publisher in 2018 and written by Tarun Khanna, professor at Harvard Business School. Entrepreneurs in developing countries with great ideas cannot rely on the usual foundations for an efficient business climate-laws, regulatory oversight, and government protections-as they might in the developed world. As a result, these entrepreneurs must not only create, but also create the conditions to create. One important lesson of this book is that obstacles to entrepreneurship and the necessary creation of trust in businesses in the developing world must be tackled holistically. The problems facing entrepreneurs in the developing world can neither be easily modularized nor tackled in bits and pieces. Professor Khanna shares many insights with readers on how to build and develop that trust. In Chapter 1, The Why's and How's of Trust (36 pages), Khanna compares the dairy industries of China and India to reveal the why's and how's of trust. Why? Because trust weaves together in a web all those needed for productive enterprise-and because, when this web is torn, there's a dramatic fall from grace. How? There are many ways to weave this web of trust, even in the same prosaic context-the production of milk. The Chinese solution emphasizes speed and high technology. In this chapter, Khanna profiles an entrepreneur borrowing tricks from California's technology industry to make his cows "happy"-while the Indian solution is a slow-but-rock-solid, community-based solution developed over decades and anchoring the future. The disparate entrepreneurial paths to the same high-productivity goal share the emphasis on trust that cocoons everyone, from dairy farmer to end consumer.

Trust: Creating the Foundation for Entrepreneurship in Developing Countries is a four-chapter book with an introduction published by Berrett-Koehler Publisher in 2018 and written by Tarun Khanna, professor at Harvard Business School. Entrepreneurs in developing countries with great ideas cannot rely on the usual foundations for an efficient business climate-laws, regulatory oversight, and government protections-as they might in the developed world. As a result, these entrepreneurs must not only create, but also create the conditions to create. One important lesson of this book is that obstacles to entrepreneurship and the necessary creation of trust in businesses in the developing world must be tackled holistically. The problems facing entrepreneurs in the developing world can neither be easily modularized nor tackled in bits and pieces. Professor Khanna shares many insights with readers on how to build and develop that trust. In Chapter 2, The Mindset Change (26 pages), Professor Khanna argues that in the developing world, entrepreneurs must evolve their mindsets to look at problems as parts of an interconnected set that need to be addressed simultaneously. The entrepreneur rarely has the luxury of focusing only on a single aspect of a complex problem. Of course, this means that she faces a heavier burden than those in a more developed country setting. The story of a surgeon-entrepreneur, Dr. Devi Shetty, shows how this mindset change both elicits and contributes to the web of trust. Trust helps the entrepreneur create the conditions to create.

Trust: Creating the Foundation for Entrepreneurship in Developing Countries is a four-chapter book with an introduction published by Berrett-Koehler Publisher in 2018 and written by Tarun Khanna, professor at Harvard Business School. Entrepreneurs in developing countries with great ideas cannot rely on the usual foundations for an efficient business climate-laws, regulatory oversight, and government protections-as they might in the developed world. As a result, these entrepreneurs must not only create, but also create the conditions to create. One important lesson of this book is that obstacles to entrepreneurship and the necessary creation of trust in businesses in the developing world must be tackled holistically. The problems facing entrepreneurs in the developing world can neither be easily modularized nor tackled in bits and pieces. Professor Khanna shares many insights with readers on how to build and develop that trust. In Chapter 4, Working as a Team with the State (36 pages), Professor Khanna shows that the developing world is characterized by widespread mistrust of the state, with government seen as incompetent at best and corrupt at worst. Yet, Khanna contends, pillorying the state is pointless. In Brazil, the state made a successful push with conditional cash transfers to move people from poverty to subsistence. But would-be entrepreneurs there have stagnated, lacking a bridge to society's mainstream. If one thinks of the different parts of society as members of a team, the situation is much like the selecão-Brazil's fabled football team-which has fallen apart lately. In India, by contrast, an unlikely entrepreneurial partnership between technologists and the state has leapfrogged the world's tech leaders to provide a billion-plus residents a unique biometric identity where none existed earlier. Both Brazil and India spotlight the need to understand entrepreneurship as a team sport for it to have impact at scale.

Trust: Creating the Foundation for Entrepreneurship in Developing Countries is a four-chapter book with an introduction published by Berrett-Koehler Publisher in 2018 and written by Tarun Khanna, professor at Harvard Business School. Entrepreneurs in developing countries with great ideas cannot rely on the usual foundations for an efficient business climate-laws, regulatory oversight, and government protections-as they might in the developed world. As a result, these entrepreneurs must not only create, but also create the conditions to create. One important lesson of this book is that obstacles to entrepreneurship and the necessary creation of trust in businesses in the developing world must be tackled holistically. The problems facing entrepreneurs in the developing world can neither be easily modularized nor tackled in bits and pieces. Professor Khanna shares many insights with readers on how to build and develop that trust. In the Introduction, Trust, Entrepreneurship and the Developing World (26 pages), Khanna argues that good ideas from the developing world can easily morph into failed ones-coupled with acrimony and mistrust-if an entrepreneur inadvertently presumes on the sustenance of trust-enhancing societal foundations that are much more robust in the developed world. In this context, the entrepreneurial solution is to embrace the situation and to explicitly focus on nurturing trust in myriad ways as a complement to whatever business or societal problem the entrepreneur intends to solve.

Trust: Creating the Foundation for Entrepreneurship in Developing Countries is a four-chapter book with an introduction published by Berrett-Koehler Publisher in 2018 and written by Tarun Khanna, professor at Harvard Business School. Entrepreneurs in developing countries with great ideas cannot rely on the usual foundations for an efficient business climate-laws, regulatory oversight, and government protections-as they might in the developed world. As a result, these entrepreneurs must not only create, but also create the conditions to create. One important lesson of this book is that obstacles to entrepreneurship and the necessary creation of trust in businesses in the developing world must be tackled holistically. The problems facing entrepreneurs in the developing world can neither be easily modularized nor tackled in bits and pieces. Professor Khanna shares many insights with readers on how to build and develop that trust. In Chapter 3, Building on Existing Social Norms (36 pages), Professor Khanna shows that entrepreneurs will find it far easier to weave their webs of trust in the developing world if they capitalize on constructive, preexisting social norms and practices. These have often been in place for decades, if not centuries, in long-running, thriving societies. In this chapter, this web of trust can be seen playing out on a nationwide scale with entrepreneurs trying to develop financially and socially sustainable microfinance firms in both Mexico and India, while in the process propelling millions of their clients-mostly poor women-out of their subsistence existence.

New technologies can be unsettling for industry incumbents, regulators, and consumers, because norms and institutions for dealing with them don't yet exist. Interestingly, businesspeople in emerging economies face similar challenges: The rules are unclear and infrastructure is lacking. In this article, the author suggests that tech pioneers would do well to heed a lesson he's gleaned from his research in the developing world: For long-term success, companies must invest in the surrounding ecosystem. The author presents examples of entrepreneurs who have done just that in China, Bangladesh, Africa, and Chile, benefiting the public as well as their own enterprises. He then describes how an Indian health care organization is tackling institutional voids as it expands into medical tourism in the Cayman Islands. An in-depth look at the nascent drone industry follows, with profiles of companies that are helping create the conditions for the industry's growth by amassing knowledge about best practices, influencing the development of regulations, exploring new uses for drones, developing a professional workforce, and so forth. The argument is that when firms launching innovative products or services look beyond their self-interest and work to collectively build the institutional infrastructure, they--and society as a whole--are more likely to prosper.

Great strategists rely heavily on numbers as they go about their work. This note offers an overview of the highbrow and lowbrow quantitative tools that individuals commonly encounter during strategy courses and in actual strategy work. The note focuses especially on simple calculations that often produce important insights.

A global environmental service provider goes through major changes to offer integrated solutions and reach out to new countries.

Approximately 1.1 billion residents of India (99% of the population) had a unique biometric identity-Aadhaar-by 2017. In six years, the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) had achieved an unprecedented milestone in emerging and developed markets. The stated objective was to create a corruption-proof social security infrastructure that enables the disenfranchised to access benefits without any diversion to middlemen and unscrupulous elements. While initially voluntary, this scheme was made mandatory in 2017 by the GOI (Government of India). What are the positive and negative implications of this, specifically related to economic development of the majority and the privacy of the individual?

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is the federal government agency responsible for evaluating and granting patent and trademark applications. In 2015, the USPTO employed approximately 8,000 patent examiners who granted nearly 300,000 patents to inventors. As of April 2016, it took roughly 26 months for a patent application to move through the evaluation process, which exceeded the office's processing goal of 20 months. In August 2016, Andrew Hirshfeld, the commissioner for patents at the USPTO, considered the current state of patent examination and future possibilities. In recent years, a number of new and exciting tools enabled by advances in telework, machine learning, and other approaches had emerged. Hirshfeld hoped to maximize these tools' utility in order to enhance patent examiners' work and productivity. Helping examiners become more productive could in turn help the USPTO achieve its joint goals of processing patent applications more quickly and granting better quality patents. But the new tools and organizational changes would bring challenges too. Any changes would have to be implemented at the grassroots of the USPTO organization, and ongoing pilots would not be successful without the buy-in and cooperation of both individual examiners as well as the union.