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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

00:29:13

Episode 66: Help Your People To Help You Succeed At...

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/10/06

Professor Andrew Foley thinks of entrepreneurship as a social process rather than as a programmatic exercise. Motivated by his experiences as a Venture for America Fellow in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, Andrew studies why exposure to the classic formulas for successful entrepreneurship often leave the entrepreneur high and dry. Success as he sees it depends on getting the community around an organization to help the entrepreneur develop an idea into fruition. That requires awareness of the

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00:25:45

Episode 65: Your Professional Peers Matter A Lot –...

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/10/02

Professor Jillian Chown studies how physicians make choices that may shape patient outcomes for the rest of the patients’ lives. What she finds is that doctors make core decisions–like whether a baby will be born by C-Section–to a significant degree through the influence of the peers within whom they recently speak. This effect is greater for generalists than for specialists. At the same time, the performance of superstar physicians on the organizational practices of their clinics may persist for

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00:26:36

Episode 64: Human Ingenuity And Resilience Tip Toward...

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/09/29

Professor Chris Eaglin studies how small-and medium-sized companies respond to strategic opportunities in low-income countries, and particularly how drivers in the minibus industry of South Africa deal with the pressures they face. Minibuses take a quarter of all South Africans to work each day. While the system is far from perfect, it is critical to the economic health of communities. The commitment of drivers to get their fares to where they need to go requires overcoming all sorts of problems:

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00:31:47

Episode 63: Our Understanding of How Scientists Work...

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/09/25

Professor Keyvan Vakili studies what makes scientists creative. He has done work on governmental policy, team selection, research design, and the balance of specializations that come together to support profound scientific achievements. What Keyvan lands on as he reflects on the trajectory of his research program is the idea that AI has been trained to be persuasive rather than scientifically accurate. This persuasiveness is so compelling that it can get us to change our minds about the right

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00:21:37

Episode 62: Rotations of Workers Across The Public...

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/09/22

Professor Carlos Inoue studies how people in different types of organizations–public companies, state-owned companies, private companies, governmental agencies, NGOs–solve a problem in ways that reflect the constraints and priorities of their employers. Physicians in public hospitals, for example, may not have access to the same kinds of equipment or even patients as their peers in private hospitals. By rotating personnel across organizations of different types, we can unlock complementarities as

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00:29:56

Episode 61: Outstanding Companies Find Long Term...

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/09/18

Professor Leandro Nardi studies pathways for achieving outstanding social and economic performance. He has examined the reasons for the persistently mediocre financial and social performance that can arise from CSR initiatives. Much of the problem has to do with the complications that arise with enfranchising the previously marginalized. Disabled persons, for example, are not rewarded with career advancement even after their inclusion in many companies. While the average company is not great at

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00:35:53

Episode 60: Public Good Depends On Recognition of...

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/09/15

Professor James Orbinski accepted the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1999 as the International Council President of Medicins Sans Frontiers. He talks with Anita about the essence of humanitarianism and the ways in which principles of mutual understanding, listening, dialogue and connection shape the public good. Citing Socrates, he reflects on how dialogue requires dignity-infused listening and a willingness to change our minds.

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00:35:02

Episode 59: Cultivating A Deep Internal...

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/09/11

Professor Jim Lavery has been a professor and advocate of healthcare for the poor for his entire life. What has he learned?The equitable distribution of drugs depends as much on the development of health systems as on new medicines. And decisions by companies to incur development costs are only one step in a cascade of constrained decisions that shape who gets essential medicines.

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00:24:51

Episode 58: There’s A Better Way To Negotiate Our Way...

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/09/08

Professor Donal Crilly studies the ways in which business decisions are influenced by the concepts of time employed by managers, entrepreneurs, investors, and other stakeholders interested in achieving important outcomes. In this conversation, he describes how an emphasis in negotiations on a shared vision of the future–in which good outcomes arise and devastatingly bad outcomes are averted–can reshape how stakeholders work together. Once we agree on a vision for the future, then we can get much

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00:23:42

Episode 57: Frontier Tech = Prosperity = Social Impact

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/09/04

Professor Pinar Ozcan is a superstar researcher, superstar teacher, and superstar thought leader. Among her many activities, she runs Oxford’s Said Entrepreneurship Centre and its FinTech Initiative. Ask her where she sees the greatest opportunity for addressing the world’s most pressing problems, and she’ll talk about innovation in investing through FinTech that can enable breakthrough tech advances, including through AI, that generate prosperity for everyone through social entrepreneurship. This

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00:34:56

Episode 56: Actualization Through Work Rests On Much...

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/09/01

Professor Russ Coff is a pioneer in our thinking about strategic human capital and its importance to the competitive advantage of firms. So why do firms train employees in broad skills that make them more employable elsewhere? And why do the relationships that we develop with colleagues and with our employers matter so much to our decisions about whether to quit?In this conversation, Russ explains some of the paradoxes that arise in employment relationships, and how our perceptions and

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00:35:50

Episode 55: Keep Talking

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/08/28

Professor John Bryson is a world-renowned expert in public administration and governance. Over the course of his career at the University of Minnesota, he has studied and written about eras in the prevailing culture of governance, particularly in the United States. We are now at a point where commitment to the core principles of the Constitution is fraying, with deep consequences for the work of government. How do we move forward?In this conversation with Anita, the two quickly turned from

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00:39:30

Episode 54: What Does The Most Highly Cited Scholar...

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/08/25

Professor Jay Barney is a legend in his time. His resource-based theory of the firm reshaped the way we think about sustained competitive advantage, and his approach to theory-building and community leadership have been foundational to the field of Strategic Management. In this conversation with Anita, he describes how and why he has turned toward philosophy and work in low-income countries during over the past ten years, and how his ideas about competitive advantage influence his work in some of

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00:28:40

Episode 53: Government Is Broken. Civic Trust Is The...

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/08/21

Matt Harder was working in ecological rehabilitation in Costa Rica when he realized that the challenges of preserving the jungle would never be met without a fundamental change in the way that government works. Since that realization, he has been striving through the firm he founded, Civic Trust, to innovate in core budget processes that drive the way that local governments allocate funds. In this episode, Matt talks with Anita about making citizen engagement fun, credible, impactful and

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00:40:20

Episode 52: Half Of All CSR Investments Aren ’ t...

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/08/18

Professor Maurizio Zollo is an OG on Corporate Social Responsibility. After studying CSR as a professor at Bocconi and INSEAD, he is now at Imperial College London where he leads the Leonardo Institute. The first of the Institute’s activities is in documenting more than a million CSR activities by 16,000 corporations. Just about half of these activities are unprofitable by design because their purpose is charitable and in advocacy. The rest are sometimes pursued as a foundation for doing business,

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00:26:00

Episode 51: The Emergence of an Industry Depends On...

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/08/14

Professor Mahka Moeen has been studying the emergence of industries for decades. In this conversation with Anita, she talks about the early prototypes of cars as fueled by a much wider range of technologies that we may have thought possible–and then compares the emergence of the industry as we know it with what might have evolved. Mahka also describes her recent work on drones, talks about the airline industry, and points to the importance of narratives in spawning new fields.

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00:37:30

Episode 50: Entrepreneurship Is Usually Just One...

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/08/11

Professor Howard Aldrich is one of the world’s foremost authorities on the building of entrepreneurial ecosystems. In this fascinating discussion with Anita, he talks about the risks of entrepreneurship without the right institutional framework, and the challenges of building a framework that reflects local conditions, capabilities and needs. Let’s teach entrepreneurship as a choice you need to make with open eyes on the ways it will affect your life.

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00:25:44

Episode 49: Entrepreneurship = Resilience + Pragmatic...

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/08/07

Professor Stefan Dimitriadis studies how entrepreneurs in Togo and Nigeria have dealt with deep-seated, long-standing challenges that are occasionally made acute through external shocks. He has found that community entrepreneurship in Togo can be strengthened through the development of outside ties. And that the relief from extortion that comes with insurgent challenges to the local government can improve entrepreneurial performance. What keeps Stefan going despite the incredible stresses that he

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00:28:35

Episode 48: Why is CSR So Unprofitable Despite The...

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/08/04

Professor Jiao Luo studies how firms organize to shape public policy, which she describes as “non-market strategy". The goal is to develop a climate through which investments in social outcomes are valued more fully–and thus become more profitable. But given this, why are corporate-social-responsibility initiatives so difficult for firms to pursue profitably? How does the governance structure of a firm shape the ways in which employees respond to CSR investments, and what new ways of doing

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00:31:19

Episode 47: “Entrepreneurship ” Is An Ideology About...

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/07/31

Professor Robert Eberhart has performed at the frontier of academics, government, entrepreneurship, and business over the course of his long career as an innovator. What interests him most is “reversing the arrow,” by which he means to understand how the cultural phenomenon that we call entrepreneurship is changing the way we relate to each other. He is striving through his scholarly work, corporate board work, and government service to respond to the incredible appetite that we have for change when

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