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PODCAST

Private Innovation in the Public Interest

Tune in with Professor Anita McGahan as she speaks with leading thinkers to understand and reinvent corporate social responsibility in service of the public good. Presented by Pi Squared, a project of the Burnes Center for Social Change at Northeastern University, this series explores new ways for companies, NGOs, and even government itself to collaborate and drive meaningful change.

business management

All Episodes

00:21:42

Episode 86: Why Do We Miss So Many High-Potential...

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2026/01/08

Professor Sharique Hasan is fascinated by the gap between ideas with high potential and their fruition in practice. In this wide-ranging and clear-thinking conversation, he outlines the core ideas in several of his most recent research projects. First, he talks about why some scientific ideas get buried, and what it might take for them to become commercialized. And second, he describes how the market for talent is changing, and the implications of the aging of the workforce in some companies.

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00:23:56

Episode 85: Entrepreneurship Takes a Village, So...

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2026/01/01

Professor Christina Lubinski takes the long view as a historian of entrepreneurship. What she sees is shared achievement, and yet we tend to celebrate the roles of single individuals as iconic of success. It’s worthwhile to consider whether this is working well. Don’t we want less disruption, and some sense of stability? And shouldn’t we recognize the many individuals who contribute collectively to the creation of new organizations? Christina will get you thinking much more deeply about what

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00:20:33

Episode 84: Eureka Moments and Credit for Ideas

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/12/25

Professor Michael Bikard studies ideas: where they come from, who gets credit, whether they get traction, and how we can measure them. In this fascinating conversation, he takes a long view to describe how history credits innovators for their ideas despite their emergence among communities of scientists. Michael talks about the high-stakes competition between Darwin and Wallace as iconic of the ways innovators become known for their Eureka moments.

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00:24:14

Episode 83: Reinventing Strategy

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/12/18

Professor Aseem Kaul began his career by studying what we call “corporate strategy:” mergers and acquisitions, for example. No more. He is now convinced that companies are not equipped to solve truly important problems such as Grand Challenges because solutions require system change beyond their capacity. What we need now is to reinvent strategy to support community organizations, non-profits, and governments to become more discerning, efficient, and effective.

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00:25:17

Episode 82: Entrepreneurship is Leadership in Innovation

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/12/11

Professor Lori Rosenkopf, Vice Dean of Entrepreneurship at the Wharton School, has spent her career expanding how we understand innovation and entrepreneurial leadership. In her new book, Unstoppable Entrepreneurship, she explores pathways to innovation that go beyond the familiar story of disruption, highlighting intrapreneurs, tech commercializers, and alternative investors who are reshaping markets from within. Lori reflects on how entrepreneurship education is evolving in the age of AI, and how

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00:30:33

Episode 81: We Have The Wills, Value, And Technology...

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/12/04

Professor Wes Sine is optimistic, deeply, convincingly, contagiously optimistic. After decades of studying the global energy transition, he believes the moment has arrived: we now have the technology, the public support, and the shift in values needed to transform how the world generates and uses energy. The missing piece is political will. In this energizing conversation with Anita, Wes explains what it will take to move from possibility to action, drawing lessons from decades of research on

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00:25:49

Episode 80: AI May Shape Geopolitics

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/11/24

Professor Nan brings a rare combination of expertise in artificial intelligence, industrial policy, and creativity. A leading scholar of U.S.–China technology strategy, she studies how national choices about data, AI adoption, and innovation policy are already reshaping global industry and power. In this wide-ranging conversation, Nan and Anita explore how the pathways through which we unleash creativity through AI could redefine geopolitics—and influence how nations compete, cooperate, and create

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00:25:45

Episode 79: Prisoner Releases, Entrepreneurship,...

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/11/20

Professor Damon Phillips studies how society's structures, beauty, and contradictions shape business and creative expression. In conversation with Anita, he discusses how entrepreneurship can offer pathways to economic independence for formerly incarcerated citizens and how the business of jazz reveals deep, profound truths about markets, creativity, and community. Through re-entry, rhythm, and reinvention, Damon reflects on how businesses can remake the societies they serve.

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00:28:02

Episode 78: The Forest for the Trees on Courage

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/11/17

Professor Ranjay Gulati is a renowned scholar of organizational networks and strategic alliances who has recently turned his attention to courage, boldness, and purpose. His newest book, How to Be Bold, explores how individuals and organizations can act decisively in the face of fear and uncertainty. He argues that courage is a choice that can be cultivated by understanding how fear arises and how we respond to it. Whether in moments of crisis or opportunity, boldness allows us to emerge stronger

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00:28:21

Episode 77: AI Can Democratize Entrepreneurship

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/11/13

Professor Rem Koning studies entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School, using experiments, data, and fieldwork to understand how AI can make innovation more inclusive. A pioneer in A/B testing and a global leader in AI for good, he believes AI can change who gets to innovate and who benefits. Instead of further enriching elite investors, AI can help on-the-ground pioneers do more with less, scaling ideas faster and smarter. In this high-energy conversation, Rem shares how AI can make

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00:24:38

Episode 76: Let’s Re-Humanize Organizations!

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/11/10

Professor Phanish Puranam wants AI to make organizations better for humans. As an eminent scholar of organization design, Phanish sees all organizations as places where humans flourish. We are at our best in groups, supported by our communities. This means that we need to use AI to “re-humanize” organizations by deploying the technology to enable our actualization.

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00:25:37

Episode 75: Let ’s Use AI to Unleash Creativity

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/11/06

Professor Florenta Teodoridis studies what makes scientists more productive and more creative AI, quantum computing, and a range of other tools relieve experts from having to perform tedious tasks. They lower coordination costs and reduce barriers to communication. All this adds up to freeing experts to be more creative by broadening the directions of innovation that they pursue. Florenta envisions that this creativity can be deployed to solve intractable problems and improve lives in critically

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00:24:27

Episode 74: Cross-Sector Partnership Solve Big...

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/11/03

Professor Aline Gatignon is passionate about both solving big problems–such as food insecurity and other Grand Challenges–by making organizations of all types more effective. She's particularly focused on how companies can work with non-governmental organizations like non-profits to innovate more and innovate better. In this fascinating conversation, Aline describes example after example of how this has occurred in the Brazilian Amazon, in Egypt’s densest urban areas, and in the wake of natural

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00:22:59

Episode 73: Let 's Get Skeptical About The Skepticism...

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/10/30

Professor Christine Nolder’s breakthrough research on the mindsets of financial auditors focuses on the extraordinary conflicts of interest between the duty to client service and their duty to sustain independent judgement. What does it take for auditors to do their work effectively? Acting with integrity in this profession depends on a slate of understandings about the role of the auditor, the supplied information, and the culture of the audit firm. We need much more information to know what’s

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00:27:22

Episode 72: We Invented The Wreck of The Titanic When...

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/10/27

Professor Lars Frederiksen’s insights as a scholar of innovation have led him to leadership in the field of technology strategy. What he wants now is to understand how our humanity leads us to actin open-innovation communities, such as the CASP and LegoPage competitions, and on open source development platforms. The incredible diversity of these communities–and the differences in the interests of their members–can lead to governance challenges that are as difficult to address as they were in

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00:29:31

Episode 71: Beware of the Dark Side of Social...

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/10/23

Professor Sophie Bacq has studied social entrepreneurship for twenty years. For the first fifteen, she focused on the social entrepreneur as an individual: whether to take on an initiative; how to fund it; how to succeed. For the past five years, though, Sophie has increasingly focused on what it takes to improve lives on terms that are important to those you are seeking to serve. Often the beneficiaries of the largesse of social entrepreneurs don’t want competitive advantage, or to win, or to beat

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00:31:04

Episode 70: The Resurgence of Large Incumbent Firms...

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/10/20

Professor Julian Birkinshaw is a renowned authority on the ambidexterity of incumbent firms that face disruptive innovations. His newest book, co-authored with Pearson’s John Fallon and entitled Resurgence, provides a roadmap for companies in this position. The core message is that AI and other disruptions need not create Kodak moments for large incumbents. Great firms can find strength in their portfolios of capabilities and build strategies to respond.

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00:32:22

Episode 69: The Capacity For Disaster Response Occurs...

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/10/16

Professor Beth Embry moved through her career deeper and deeper into finding solutions to the problems that give rise to disasters–even those disasters that at first appear to be natural, such as earthquakes and hurricanes. These events become disasters when communities are not prepared to respond to them effective in the immediate, short-term and long-term. There are many layers to what creates an effective response, but two jump out from Beth’s scholarly work. The first is the ability of a

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00:29:49

Episode 68: No More Whack-A-Mole. Managers Need To...

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/10/13

Professor Lamar Pierce studies the tension between employee performance and misconduct. High-powered incentives to sell more stuff, for example, can lead salespeople to lower prices or even misreport what they have sold. It is this kind of misconduct (and much worse) that Lamar studies. What does it take to rout this out? Lots and lots of time to get the right people and systems in place, and then the discipline to get out of the way.

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00:25:28

Episode 67: Great Companies Force A Reckoning On...

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/10/09

Professor András Tilcsik studies the dark sides of organizations: discrimination, disasters, crises. His scholarly work demonstrates, for example, that companies must analyze comprehensively where discrimination is arising in their hiring practices if they want to root it out. Adopting a new approach to the recruiting of applications, a go-to improvement, is typically insufficient to address the problems behind the problems. Truly great organizations learn how to present disasters by doing a

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86 results

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