Beginning October 30, Tarun Khanna, HBS, SAI Director, with Sue Goldie, HSPH, will offer the first of a series of HarvardX courses on South Asia. This 12 week course is free and open to the public.
About this Course
Entrepreneurship and Healthcare in Emerging Economies aims to engage students in an inter-disciplinary approach to understanding the nature of complex health problems throughout the world, with an illustrative focus on South Asia.
Students will become acquainted with prior attempts to address these problems, to identify points of opportunity for smart entrepreneurial efforts, and to propose and develop their own candidate solutions.
Throughout, the emphasis is on individual agency—what can the learner do to address a defined problem?
While we use the lens of health to explore entrepreneurial opportunities, students will see that both problems and solutions are inevitably of a multi-disciplinary nature, and we will draw on a range of sectors and fields of study.
Course Instructors
Tarun Khanna, Director, SAI
Tarun Khanna is the Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at the Harvard Business School, where he has studied and worked with multinational and indigenous companies and investors in emerging markets worldwide. He was named Harvard University’s Director of the South Asia Institute in the fall of 2010. He joined the HBS faculty in 1993, after obtaining an engineering degree from Princeton University (1988) and a Ph.D. from Harvard (1993), and an interim stint on Wall Street. During this time, he has served as the head of several courses on strategy, corporate governance, and international business targeted to MBA students and senior executives at Harvard. He currently teaches in Harvard’s College’s General Education core curriculum in a university wide elective course on entrepreneurship in South Asia. He is also the Faculty Chair for HBS activities in India.
Sue J. GoldieProfessor Goldie is the Director of the new Global Health Education and Learning Incubator at Harvard University, and a special adviser to the provost on global health education and learning. She was previously the faculty director of the Harvard Global Health Institute. Her professional agenda includes improving women’s health in all parts of the world, using evidence-based policy to reduce global health inequities, building bridges between disciplines to tackle critical public health challenges, and fostering innovation in education.
1) Why teach about global health and entrepreneurship?
http://youtu.be/CYewhNVLrYE
Global health does not equal poverty, which even carries over to how Sue selected wall art at HGHI and the Global Learning Incubator. Sue & Tarun want students to gravitate toward finding entrepreneurial solutions in unexpected places, not just areas traditionally associated with health.
http://youtu.be/bqCCfjq9YgU
Sue asks Tarun where South Asia is. Tarun replies, including how South Asia is defined by SAI.
3) What does the person on the street think about health?
http://youtu.be/sqJ4qYYW_uo
Tarun considers what the person on the street might say if you asked them what health is. Sue notes that there is no common definition of what health is. It may be productive to think of wellbeing in terms of opportunities and capabilities.
4) What does it mean to be an entrepreneur?
http://youtu.be/KZ2Nbj8Zde0
Sue notes that classifying entrepreneurship into traditional categories, such as for-profit and not-for-profit, is less helpful than thinking about the kinds of contributions that different people make and the guiding principles for this. Tarun adds that he thinks of an entrepreneur as someone trying to do something new, no matter what that happens to be or whether they are part of a company or not.
5) What is the connection between entrepreneurship & innovation?
http://youtu.be/WaRTCYpci9s
Successful entrepreneurship requires elements of both innovation and execution.
6) Going Beyond “Do No Harm”—The Co-Production of Knowledge
http://youtu.be/nMYlXvG9znQ
Tarun clarifies what he means by thinking of South Asia as a laboratory, in response to concerns about whether this was a responsible term to use. Sue explains the importance of entrepreneurship as the co-production of knowledge.