Private Innovation in the Public Interest
Episodes
101: Colleen Cunningham. Guardrails + Incentives - Excessive Competition = Innovation
23 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Colleen Cunningham studies why and how companies accomplish innovations that benefit the public, such as in pharmaceuticals and alternative ...
100: Anita McGahan. What have we learned, and where do we go from here?
16 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In this milestone episode, host Anita McGahan reflects on the key themes explored across the podcast's first 100 episodes,which bring together sch...
99: Barry Finette. It's always just about the patient.
09 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Barry Finette is a global-health physician who decided as a college student to pursue his passions and to find a career in which he had cont...
Episode 98: AI can take over drudgework and free you up to do more meaningful work
02 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Professor DK Kryscynski is an expert on how employees bring their unique skills and capabilities into their employment duties in ways that create valu...
Episode 97: Finding untapped potential in underserved corners of markets
26 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Bryan Stroube of the University of Kentucky has studied English, Engineering, and Management – all with a passion for understanding the hu...
Episode 96: How ambience, spatial configuration and aesthetics unlock strategic human capital
19 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Bukky Oyedeji is a LEED-certified architect with extensive experience in designing physical workspaces in the UK, the US and Africa. As ...
Episode 95: What employees want from firms may not be optimized social impact
12 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Christiane Bode studies how firms implement social-impact initiatives. In this far-reaching conversation with Anita, she emphasizes how ...
Episode 94: Strategy offers serious insights on how to create structures that shape corporate investments
05 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Michael Leiblein has studied a wide range of subjects over the course of his long and storied career. Mostrecently, he has examined how ...
Episode 93: Find solutions to long problems
26 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Arzi Adbi hails from the poorest province of India, Bihar, where he studied assiduously for exams so that he could become an engineer. ...
Episode 92: Soul is what makes entrepreneurs successful.
19 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Sharon Alvarez transformed the field of entrepreneurship through her early work on Jay Barney showing that entrepreneurship is about creatin...
Episode 91: Scientific knowledge doesn’t flow like water. It is exchanged by people who need support.
12 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Caroline Fry studies how low-and middle-income countries build scientific capabilities, which occurs onescientist at a time. The success...
Episode 90: Innovation has at least as much to do with transforming people as with technology
05 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Isin Guler is a renowned expert on the limitations of venture-capital investing for stimulating entrepreneurship. Among other problems, in...
Episode 89: To understand success and failure, you need to understand the people involved.
29 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Kris Irwin had a fifteen-year career as a management consultant prior to earning her PhD at theUniversity of Alabama. In this inspired...
Episode 88: What are we going to do with the stranded assets of oil & gas companies?
22 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Jeffrey York is the OG on environmental scholarship in the field of management. The titles of some of his most recent work suggest optim...
Episode 87: Responsible AI, Regulatory Ambiguity, and Improving Lives
15 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Nur Ahmed studies how frontier technologies like AI, geothermal energy, and quantum computing can improve lives. In AI, for example, a remar...
Episode 86: Why Do We Miss So Many High-Potential Ideas and the People Who Produce Them?
08 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Sharique Hasan is fascinated by the gap between ideas with high potential and their fruition in practice. In this wide-ranging and clear...
Episode 85: Entrepreneurship Takes a Village, So Let’s Stop Heroizing Start-Up CEOs
01 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Christina Lubinski takes the long view as a historian of entrepreneurship. What she sees is shared achievement, and yet we tend to celebra...
Episode 84: Eureka Moments and Credit for Ideas
25 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Michael Bikard studies ideas: where they come from, who gets credit, whether they get traction, and how we can measure them. In this fas...
Episode 83: Reinventing Strategy
18 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Aseem Kaul began his career by studying what we call “corporate strategy:” mergers and acquisitions, for example. No more. He is n...
Episode 82: Entrepreneurship is Leadership in Innovation
11 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Lori Rosenkopf, Vice Dean of Entrepreneurship at the Wharton School, has spent her career expanding how we understand innovation and entrepr...
Episode 81: We Have The Wills, Value, And Technology For An Energy Transition.
04 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Wes Sine is optimistic, deeply, convincingly, contagiously optimistic. After decades of studying the global energy transition, he believes t...
Episode 80: AI May Shape Geopolitics
24 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Nan brings a rare combination of expertise in artificial intelligence, industrial policy, and creativity. A leading scholar of U.S.–China ...
Episode 79: Prisoner Releases, Entrepreneurship, Jazz, Creativity, and a Sociologist Who Loves Talking with Economists
20 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Damon Phillips studies how society's structures, beauty, and contradictions shape business and creative expression. In conversation with...
Episode 78: The Forest for the Trees on Courage
17 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Ranjay Gulati is a renowned scholar of organizational networks and strategic alliances who has recently turned his attention to courage, bol...
Episode 77: AI Can Democratize Entrepreneurship
13 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Rem Koning studies entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School, using experiments, data, and fieldwork to understand how AI can make innovat...
Episode 76: Let’s Re-Humanize Organizations!
10 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Phanish Puranam wants AI to make organizations better for humans. As an eminent scholar of organization design, Phanish sees all organizatio...
Episode 75: Let ’s Use AI to Unleash Creativity
06 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Florenta Teodoridis studies what makes scientists more productive and more creative AI, quantum computing, and a range of other tools reliev...
Episode 74: Cross-Sector Partnership Solve Big Problems in Ways that Make Organizations of All Types Perform Better
03 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Aline Gatignon is passionate about both solving big problems–such as food insecurity and other Grand Challenges–by making organizations ...
Episode 73: Let 's Get Skeptical About The Skepticism of Financial Auditors
30 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Christine Nolder’s breakthrough research on the mindsets of financial auditors focuses on the extraordinary conflicts of interest between ...
Episode 72: We Invented The Wreck of The Titanic When We Invented The Titanic. Let’s Not Do That With AI.
27 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 i...
Episode 71: Beware of the Dark Side of Social Entrepreneurship. What ’s the Bright Side? Elevating Shared Interests, Practices, Identities and Fates
23 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Sophie Bacq has studied social entrepreneurship for twenty years. For the first fifteen, she focused on the social entrepreneur as an indivi...
Episode 70: The Resurgence of Large Incumbent Firms Is Not Just Possible, It’s Widespread.
20 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Julian Birkinshaw is a renowned authority on the ambidexterity of incumbent firms that face disruptive innovations. His newest book, co-auth...
Episode 69: The Capacity For Disaster Response Occurs Before The Disaster Occurs
16 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Beth Embry moved through her career deeper and deeper into finding solutions to the problems that give rise to disasters–even those disast...
Episode 68: No More Whack-A-Mole. Managers Need To Think About Problems That Can Arise From The Incentives They Put In Place.
13 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Lamar Pierce studies the tension between employee performance and misconduct. High-powered incentives to sell more stuff, for example, can l...
Episode 67: Great Companies Force A Reckoning On Unwanted Problems
09 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor András Tilcsik studies the dark sides of organizations: discrimination, disasters, crises. His scholarly work demonstrates, for example, th...
Episode 66: Help Your People To Help You Succeed At Developing A Great Idea
06 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Andrew Foley thinks of entrepreneurship as a social process rather than as a programmatic exercise. Motivated by his experiences as a Ventur...
Episode 65: Your Professional Peers Matter A Lot – Even More Than Your Organizational Mandate – To What You Do
02 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Jillian Chown studies how physicians make choices that may shape patient outcomes for the rest of the patients’ lives. What she finds is t...
Episode 64: Human Ingenuity And Resilience Tip Toward Collaborative Community Even Under The Most Difficult of Circumstances
29 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Chris Eaglin studies how small-and medium-sized companies respond to strategic opportunities in low-income countries, and particularly how d...
Episode 63: Our Understanding of How Scientists Work Is a Mess. AI Can Take Advantage of That To Persuade Us We’re Wrong When We’re Right.
25 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Keyvan Vakili studies what makes scientists creative. He has done work on governmental policy, team selection, research design, and the bala...
Episode 62: Rotations of Workers Across The Public And Private Sectors Can Unlock Value Creation
22 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Carlos Inoue studies how people in different types of organizations–public companies, state-owned companies, private companies, government...
Episode 61: Outstanding Companies Find Long Term Payoffs Through Excellence In Creating Value For Society
18 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Leandro Nardi studies pathways for achieving outstanding social and economic performance. He has examined the reasons for the persistently m...
Episode 60: Public Good Depends On Recognition of Each Others’ Innate Dignity
15 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor James Orbinski accepted the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1999 as the International Council President of Medicins Sans Frontiers. He talks wi...
Episode 59: Cultivating A Deep Internal Acknowledgement of Others’ Interests Gives Us Our Best Chance at Solving Public Problems
11 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Episode 58: There’s A Better Way To Negotiate Our Way Toward A Sustainable Future Than You May Think
08 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Donal Crilly studies the ways in which business decisions are influenced by the concepts of time employed by managers, entrepreneurs, invest...
Episode 57: Frontier Tech = Prosperity = Social Impact
04 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Pinar Ozcan is a superstar researcher, superstar teacher, and superstar thought leader. Among her many activities, she runs Oxford’s Said ...
Episode 56: Actualization Through Work Rests On Much More Than What You Get Paid
01 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 fir...
Episode 55: Keep Talking
28 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor John Bryson is a world-renowned expert in public administration and governance. Over the course of his career at the University of Minnesota...
Episode 54: What Does The Most Highly Cited Scholar In The Field of Strategy See As Important Right Now?
25 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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, a...
Episode 53: Government Is Broken. Civic Trust Is The Fix.
21 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Matt Harder was working in ecological rehabilitation in Costa Rica when he realized that the challenges of preserving the jungle would never be met wi...
Episode 52: Half Of All CSR Investments Aren ’ t Intended To Be Profitable
18 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 C...
Episode 51: The Emergence of an Industry Depends On Tech + Demand + Ecosystem + Institutions
14 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Mahka Moeen has been studying the emergence of industries for decades. In this conversation with Anita, she talks about the early prototypes...
Episode 50: Entrepreneurship Is Usually Just One Chapter in a Rich Life
11 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Howard Aldrich is one of the world’s foremost authorities on the building of entrepreneurial ecosystems. In this fascinating discussion wi...
Episode 49: Entrepreneurship = Resilience + Pragmatic Pivoting in the Face of Extortion and Other Problems
07 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Stefan Dimitriadis studies how entrepreneurs in Togo and Nigeria have dealt with deep-seated, long-standing challenges that are occasionally...
Episode 48: Why is CSR So Unprofitable Despite The Best Efforts of Companies To Shape Public Policy To Support It?
04 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Jiao Luo studies how firms organize to shape public policy, which she describes as “non-market strategy". The goal is to develop a cl...
Episode 47: “Entrepreneurship ” Is An Ideology About How We Relate To Each Other That Rarely Delivers On What We Are Reaching For
31 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Robert Eberhart has performed at the frontier of academics, government, entrepreneurship, and business over the course of his long career as...
Episode 46: African Entrepreneurship Occurs In Community, Not Through The Individual Acting Alone
28 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Tim Weiss raises foundational questions about the basis of successful entrepreneurship in Africa, which occurs in communities such as the 10...
Episode 45: Repeated Interactions Between Microfinance Lenders And Borrowers Can Elevate Outcomes
24 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Laura Doering is perhaps best known for her pioneering work on microfinance in low-income countries, including India, Colombia, and Kenya. O...
Episode 44: Entrepreneurship in Africa Demands More of Us Than We May Be Giving
21 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Episode 43: Sometimes The Best Way to Serve The Public Is Privately
17 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Ilze Kivleniece has examined tradeoffs in public goals such as providing high-quality water in small, rural French towns. Her pioneering stu...
Episode 42 : How Redemption of a Degraded, Contaminated Piece of Commercial Property Can Lead To The Rebuilding of Community
14 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Eppa Rixey studies how regulators compete to enable business activity in their jurisdictions–and how they can cultivate community identity and engag...
Episode 41: Stakeholder Power = Holding Managers True To Corporate Purpose
10 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Pushpika Vishwanathan is an eminent authority on how stakeholders are enfranchised in company activities. She studies criteria that legitimi...
Episode 40: AI Is Helping Scientists Understand The Nature of Life Itself
07 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Gabriel Cavalli studies the ways in which AI tools have enhanced understanding of the protein-folding problem at the heart of what constitut...
Episode 39: Reshaping Opportunities to Enhance Entrepreneurship Can Exclude Those Who Need It Most
03 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Arielle Newman made the transition from political science to entrepreneurship because she wanted to get away from broad policy prescriptions...
Episode 38 : Democratizing Science is a Powerful Act of Social Justice
30 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Chirantan Chatterjee has devoted his life to fulfilling the vision for justice of his countryman, the Nobel-Prize winning economist, Amartya...
Episode 37: Let ’s Tame Corporate Power NOW
26 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Jerry Davis has long advocated for clear and deep thinking about the ways in which corporations are changing, and the implications for the w...
Episode 36 : Unleashing the Full Potential of AI Requires a Whole New Approach to Investing
23 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Episode 35: Humanitarian Aid is Much More Effective When Targeted Recipients Know in Advance That it’s Coming
19 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Tarek Ghani has devoted himself to studying how digital technologies can improve the lives of the most vulnerable citizens of fragile states...
Episode 34: Your Community Can Achieve its Goals More Effectively by Working With State and Federal Authorities
16 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Devin Stein is redefining what it means to serve the public interest effectively. In a recent study on fire prevention in Northern Californi...
Episode 33: Let’s Have an Adult Conversation About Energy Security
12 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Shon Hiatt has been devoted to accomplishing a transition to electrification, clean energy, and energy security for his entire career. What ...
Episode 32: We Don’t Cure What We Can’t Diagnose, but We Don’t Find Medicines for Diseases that We Don’t Know About
09 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Sukhun Kang was motivated to turn from a promising career as a computer scientist toward studying the biopharmaceutical industry after his f...
Episode 31: Bringing High-Tech Products to Low-Income Communities Depends on Deep, Time-Consuming Engagement to Overcome Local Resistance
05 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Diana Jue-Rajasingh has devoted her entire career to understanding why great products designed for low-income settings in places like her Al...
Episode 30: We’re Being Unfair to Future Generations Without Sustainability
02 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Mark Desjardine is concerned about our generation’s obligations to preserve the environment for future generations – and the implication...
Episode 29: Our Understanding of Returns to ESG Investing Needs to be Interrogated
28 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Andrew King devotes himself to the challenge of replicating the results of important empirical studies in the fields of ESG investing, susta...
Episode 28: How a Large NGO Advocates for Small Partners
25 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Catherine D’Amato is an internationally renowned leader in the food-security movement. Serving as CEO of the Greater Boston Food Bank for three dec...
Episode 27: Use Your Company’s Assets for Good
21 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Brennan Lake has pioneered the Data For Good movement since 2018 as Vice President of Social Impact & Enterprise Partnerships at Cuebiq. In a sec...
Episode 26: Across Sectors, Entrepreneurship = Collaboration + Trust
19 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Peter Klein of Baylor University highlights the importance of long-standing relationships and trust in the kinds of collaborations that driv...
Episode 25: Social-Change Advocates Can Help Companies Innovate
15 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Kate Odziemkowska of the University of Toronto has found in her research that social-change advocates are partnering with companies to help ...
Episode 24: Change the World by Understanding Your Neighbors
12 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Myles Shaver of the University of Minnesota works with students from different disciplines to turn their focus from changing the world to un...
Episode 23: Let’s Find a Common Agenda on Climate and Other Social Challenges
08 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Nicolai Foss of the Copenhagen Business School and Anita have sometimes found themselves on opposite sides of debates about climate change a...
Episode 22: Making Space for Change in a System That Resists Disruption
05 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Yiannis Ioannou of the London Business School teaches about how the sustainability challenge disrupts even successful large companies. What ...
Episode 21: Change Happens one Entrepreneur at a Time
01 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Dan Cowen, Senior Consultant at InNova and the Build from Within Alliance, works with city leaders to foster local entrepreneurship. Dan is inspired b...
Episode 20: The System Must Change
28 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Tima Bansal of the Ivey Business School discusses the imperative for systems change, emphasizing that it requires both governments and compa...
Episode 19: Move Social Impact from the Periphery to the Core of Your Company
24 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Rudy Durand of HEC Paris, a pioneer in Corporate Social Responsibility, believes the focus is shifting toward a new approach to social impac...
Episode 18: The Paradoxes and Dilemmas of Transparency
21 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Shirley Tang of Bocconi University, a global citizen with experience in China’s oil & gas industry as well as academia, studies the pa...
Episode 17: Trust and Commitment in Public-Private Partnership
17 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Henri Hammond-Paul, Sante Fe’s Director of Community Health and Public Safety, explains how government actors often hesitate to rely on the promises...
Episode 16: Mountains Beyond Mountains
14 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Daphne Baldassari of the University of Southern California shares her research on the Oscars So White and #MeToo movements in the film indus...
Episode 15: Small Companies can Drive the Social Impact of Big Companies
10 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor and GIDMO Founder Tunji Adegbesan discusses the challenges that GIDMO faced in providing educational materials to hundreds of thousands of t...
Episode 14: Get Inspired by NASA
07 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Raja Roy of the Stevens Institute of Technology, an expert on NASA's achievements, joins Anita to discuss the Space Shuttle, the world’s f...
Episode 13: Be Bigger Than Your Job
03 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Jasjit Singh of INSEAD argues that the skillsets taught in MBA programs are often too narrow and lack the ambition needed for today’s chal...
Episode 12: Investing in the General Education of Some of the World’s Lowest-Income Workers
31 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Thomaz Teodorovicz examines how investments by companies in the general education of low-income workers can lead to unexpected improvements ...
Episode 11: Let’s Tap into Humanity’s Greatest Strength: Collaboration
27 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Dovev Lavie is dedicated to building new institutions that leverage our collaborative and altruistic instincts, rather than our competitive ...
Episode 10: Listen to Your Community and Then Act Justly
24 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Sergio Lazzarini of INSPER, one of Brazil's leading business schools, is deeply engaged in various sustainability initiatives. He believ...
Episode 9: The Power of Harnessing Ideals to Drive Change
20 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor and Vice Dean Witold Henisz, who leads ESG initiatives at Wharton, describesthe polarized debate surrounding corporate social responsibility...
Episode 8: Don’t Give up. Co-create. Innovate. Try Something!
17 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Sarah Kaplan, an expert on stakeholder engagement, views trade-offs between stakeholder needs as opportunities for innovation. However, navi...
Episode 7: Companies Can Experiment Where Governments Can’t
13 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Sandro Cabral provides a profoundly simple answer to Anita’s pressing question: Why can’t governments solve public problems without assi...
Episode 6: Individual Social Entrepreneurs Can Succeed Where Governments Can’t
10 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Samina Karim describes two inspiring NGOs in Central America that succeed where local governments are unable to act.
Episode 5: Holding Companies Accountable Against Greenwashing
06 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Olga Hawn explains how the CSR movement paved the way for its greenwashing downfall by relying on professional PR firms to promote achieveme...
Episode 4: The Heavy Responsibility of Government Should be Taken More Seriously
03 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Civic leader and venture investor Kate Cummings joins Anita to talk about how little we teach in business schools about how governments operate.
Episode 3: Get Strategic by Scaling Up Well-Tested Approaches
07 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor and Dean Emeritus Roger Martin encourages company leaders to address critical public problems by leveraging their strengths: scaling proven ...
Episode 2: Let’s Right Wrongs That are Readily Fixable – And Do it Now
07 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Leo Pongeluppe discusses how online retailers charge higher prices in poorer areas of Rio’s favelas compared to wealthier neighborhoods ju...