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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

00:34:39

Episode 46: African Entrepreneurship Occurs In...

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/07/28

Professor Tim Weiss raises foundational questions about the basis of successful entrepreneurship in Africa, which occurs in communities such as the 105 co-located car repair shops in the Dagoretti neighborhood of Nairobi. These entrepreneurs are collaborating through apprenticeship programs, referrals, collaborations, and even mutual welfare funds like insurance. The success of each one is deeply embedded in the success of the others. Bring a Western lens that emphasizes the achievements of

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00:25:04

Episode 45: Repeated Interactions Between...

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/07/24

Professor Laura Doering is perhaps best known for her pioneering work on microfinance in low-income countries, including India, Colombia, and Kenya. Overall, her findings raise fundamental questions about whether systems designed for high-income countries can work in places where entrepreneurship is a matter of necessity. The ways in which organizations compel repeated interactions shapes the relationships that people develop, and the outcomes that they achieve. Sometimes these outcomes are what the

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00:25:36

Episode 44: Entrepreneurship in Africa Demands More...

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/07/21

Professor Rob Nason is tired of the myopic exportation of entrepreneurship ideas and training from high-income to low-income countries. He’s gone as far as to say that teaching entrepreneurship in Africa in the same way as we do in North America can put lives at risk. In this incisive, insightful conversation, he describes how his research in African and other low-income contexts has made him keenly aware of the ways in which western systems rest on ideas about competition, value, and

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00:25:23

Episode 43: Sometimes The Best Way to Serve The...

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/07/17

Professor Ilze Kivleniece has examined tradeoffs in public goals such as providing high-quality water in small, rural French towns. Her pioneering studies on water utilities in France demonstrate how public and private utilities act differently in the public interest, and on how hard it is for local governmental officials to work effectively with corporate executives. In this warm and friendly conversation with Anita, she explains the conceptual issues–and talks about the importance of effective

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00:32:39

Episode 42 : How Redemption of a Degraded,...

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/07/14

Eppa Rixey studies how regulators compete to enable business activity in their jurisdictions–and how they can cultivate community identity and engagement in the process. Eppa is passionate about how companies such as craft brewers help create places in cities where relationships, trust, and connection thrive. His passion also extends to a local project in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at Jerry’s Pond, where a real-estate developer has worked with local groups to envision how this asbestos-filled space

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00:25:32

Episode 41: Stakeholder Power = Holding Managers True...

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/07/10

Professor Pushpika Vishwanathan is an eminent authority on how stakeholders are enfranchised in company activities. She studies criteria that legitimize stakeholders: transactions, community members, and even the natural environment. How do we know who is in and who is out? It really depends on a case-by-case analysis by managers of organizations, she says. She explains how managers are held true to the corporation’s purpose by employees, customers, regulators, and other stakeholders–at least

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00:29:56

Episode 40: AI Is Helping Scientists Understand The...

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/07/07

Professor Gabriel Cavalli studies the ways in which AI tools have enhanced understanding of the protein-folding problem at the heart of what constitutes life itself. Specifically, he has studied how the Nobel Prize winning modelers at Google Deep Mind won the CASP competition in 2018 and 2020, and the implications of this achievement for the organization of academic laboratories dedicated to the development of new medicines and of insights about the nature of life-giving processes. In this

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00:28:08

Episode 39: Reshaping Opportunities to Enhance...

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/07/03

Professor Arielle Newman made the transition from political science to entrepreneurship because she wanted to get away from broad policy prescriptions and move toward bottom-up creative opportunities–particularly for poor and vulnerable communities such as those that she has studied in Ghana. What did she find in a deep and extensive examination of the reshaping of the Kumasi market to improve public safety for those who work there? An exclusion of those who had made the market what it was through

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00:36:40

Episode 38 : Democratizing Science is a Powerful Act...

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/06/30

Professor Chirantan Chatterjee has devoted his life to fulfilling the vision for justice of his countryman, the Nobel-Prize winning economist, Amartya Sen. From his early years as an engineer and journalist through his scholarly accomplishments as a Professor, Chirantan has been devoted to the joint achievement of access to essential medicines and innovation in their provision. This far-reaching, idea-rich, insightful conversation anchors on Sen’s famous thought experiment about who in a society

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00:34:55

Episode 37: Let ’s Tame Corporate Power NOW

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/06/26

Professor Jerry Davis has long advocated for clear and deep thinking about the ways in which corporations are changing, and the implications for the ways in which we live our lives. In this conversation, he talks with Anita about his book on taming big tech companies to serve the public interest. When Anita asks Jerry to imagine what he would do if he were in charge of everything, he wrestles with the paradox between how he would wield big-institutional authoritarianism to stop climate change while

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00:29:52

Episode 36 : Unleashing the Full Potential of AI...

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/06/23

Leah Morris has as much experience in venture investing on developing science as anyone in her generation. At the same time, she has been tireless in her advocacy for the poor and vulnerable. What is changing now is that AI is permeating our lives comprehensively–whether we pursue it or not. And achieving the kinds of breakthrough science that will accelerate the next generation of AI requires a kind of nurturing that the investing community has not universally embraced in the past. Applying these

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00:28:37

Episode 35: Humanitarian Aid is Much More Effective...

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/06/19

Professor Tarek Ghani has devoted himself to studying how digital technologies can improve the lives of the most vulnerable citizens of fragile states, including especially Afghanistan. In this provocative interview, he describes how deepening our understanding of how the targeted recipients of aid with information that the aid is sitting in their mobile-money accounts increases its uptake from 40% to an astonishing 99%. In other work, he shows how and why conflict arises at the periphery of

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00:24:18

Episode 34: Your Community Can Achieve its Goals More...

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/06/16

Professor Devin Stein is redefining what it means to serve the public interest effectively. In a recent study on fire prevention in Northern California, he demonstrates how local planning—such as geo-mapping available logging roads—can enhance the effectiveness of state and federal response efforts during a wildfire. More broadly, his work explores all the different ways in which each of us belongs to various public communities, and how we can make each more effective by linking them together.

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00:35:11

Episode 33: Let’s Have an Adult Conversation About...

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/06/12

Professor Shon Hiatt has been devoted to accomplishing a transition to electrification, clean energy, and energy security for his entire career. What is it going to take to accomplish this at scale? Global conflict and persistent poverty in under-supported countries have raised the stakes considerably at the same time as AI, with its promise for driving economic growth, burst onto the scene demanding ten times as much energy as predecessor technologies. Shon retains his optimism that technological

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00:25:20

Episode 32: We Don’t Cure What We Can’t Diagnose, but...

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/06/09

Professor Sukhun Kang was motivated to turn from a promising career as a computer scientist toward studying the biopharmaceutical industry after his family member was diagnosed with a rare cancer. Why don’t we have enough drugs for devastating diseases such as the one that afflicted his relative, and why can’t we make those that we do have more widely available? Sukhun’s research shows that the costs of administering programs designed to make cancer drugs available more widely to late-stage patients

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00:29:18

Episode 31: Bringing High-Tech Products to Low-Income...

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/06/05

Professor Diana Jue-Rajasingh has devoted her entire career to understanding why great products designed for low-income settings in places like her Alma Mater, MIT, are not adopted. As co-founder of a distribution and marketing company called Essmart Global, she learned that distribution infrastructure and consumer education are essential – but not enough to assure uptake. As a scholar, she found that local resistance arises from long-term exposure to practices that typically keep investment

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00:31:15

Episode 30: We’re Being Unfair to Future Generations...

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/06/02

Professor Mark Desjardine is concerned about our generation’s obligations to preserve the environment for future generations – and the implications of them for corporations. What is sustainability, really? And how do companies deal with tradeoffs between short- and long-term value-creating goals? Mark’s answer to this question in part rests on insights about how advocates of different types can help managers to appreciate fully the ways in which their organizations can move toward solutions to

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00:31:07

Episode 29: Our Understanding of Returns to ESG...

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/05/28

Professor Andrew King devotes himself to the challenge of replicating the results of important empirical studies in the fields of ESG investing, sustainable finance, and corporate social responsibility. After discovering a raft of anomalies, he is now advocating for what he calls a “living conversation” in the journals on our findings. We need to publish more comments, more questions, and more methodological inquiries in a dialogue over important findings to assure their robustness and overcome the

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00:28:43

Episode 28: How a Large NGO Advocates for Small Partners

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/05/25

Catherine D’Amato is an internationally renowned leader in the food-security movement. Serving as CEO of the Greater Boston Food Bank for three decades, she invented and reinvented a model through which the GBFB advocates for 190 smaller, community-based partners with suppliers, distributors, technologists, and – remarkably – governments. Consistently ranked as among the most important leaders in Boston, she describes the critical relationship between empathy for local neighbors and advocacy at

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00:23:48

Episode 27: Use Your Company’s Assets for Good

Private Innovation in the Public Interest ·

2025/05/21

Brennan Lake has pioneered the Data For Good movement since 2018 as Vice President of Social Impact & Enterprise Partnerships at Cuebiq. In a sector in which privacy concerns and data-sharing are notoriously intractable, he and his colleagues have found a way forward through an emphasis on mission, messaging, measures, and monetization.

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86 results

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