Over 200 students attended the first day of the class during shopping week.
On Wednesday, September 3, the fall Gen Ed course ‘SW47: Contemporary Developing Countries: Entrepreneurial Solutions to Intractable Social and Economic Problems’ began, which is co-taught by SAI faculty Tarun Khanna, Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor, Harvard Business School; Director, Harvard South Asia Institute, Satchit Balsari, Assistant Professor, Weill Cornell Medical College; Director of the Weill Cornell Medical College Global Emergency Medicine Program; Fellow Harvard FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, Krzysztof Gajos, Associate Professor, Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences , Doris Sommer, Ira Jewell Williams, Jr. Professor of Romance Languages and Literature; Director of Graduate Studies in Spanish, Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and Rahul Mehrotra, Professor of Urban Design and Planning, Harvard Graduate School of Design.
The innovative interdisciplinary course is unique at Harvard, and is open to all students across Harvard, including undergraduates and graduate students. The course will provide a framework (and multiple lenses) through which to think about the salient economic and social problems of the five billion people of the developing world, and to work in a team setting toward identifying entrepreneurial solutions to such problems. Case study discussions will cover challenges and solutions in fields as diverse as health, education, technology, urban planning, and arts and the humanities.
Below, listen to some of the faculty talk about how the course will encourage students to think like an entrepreneur:
Think like a humanist: Doris Sommer, FAS
Think like an engineer: Krzysztof Gajos, SEAS
Think like an entrepreneur: Tarun Khanna, SAI, HBS